


I Know Your Secret. Your Furry Little Secret.

by geicogecko



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Any relationships are incredibly vague and not important right now, BEING A WEREWOLF CAN ALSO BE AN ANALOGY FOR ADHD O K A Y, Because I'm a lesbian and I say so 😌, Genderswapped Losers Club (IT), Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Mild Blood, OKAY but the WEREWOLF GAY ANALOGY works WAY BETTER with HORRIBLE LESBIAN STEREOTYPES, Richie Tozier Has ADHD, Sensory Overload, Six Girls and One (1) Very Good Boy, Vaguely train of thought, Werewolf Richie Tozier
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:35:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 26,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28332489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geicogecko/pseuds/geicogecko
Summary: It hadn't been a werewolf in the Derry Middle School's girl's locker room.Not at first.But what it was at first doesn't really fucking matter now does it? Not now that Richie Tozier is cursed, probably. Not now that Richie Tozier has another deep dark secret she needs to hide from Derry so it doesn't get her killed.Fan-fucking-tastic.(It hadn't been a werewolf in Derry Middle School's girl's locker room, not at first, not during, not after. It had been the eater of worlds. But Richie Tozier doesn't know that, and, well, belief sure is a powerful thing, isn't it?)
Relationships: (For Right Now), (one-sided), Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier/Stanley Uris
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	1. Teen Wolf 2: This time she's a lesbian

(It hadn’t been a werewolf, not a first. That's what she'll say later when things are calmer, always too defensive for something that doesn't really need defending.

But she's right. It hadn't been a werewolf at first.

Actually, it had never _really_ been a werewolf at all.) 

Richie crashed into the supposed-to-be-empty locker room, nose bleeding and chest heaving and left shoe still untied because they’d caught her when she was bent over trying to loop the laces back together, which she really thinks should be against the rules of bullying. She locks the handle with clumsy fingers, pressing her back against the door, pretending she, in all her eighty nine point four pound glory, could be any sort of second barricade. Somewhere, too close to for comfort, outside the door Vic Criss tells Henry Bowers to give it up, and she flinches when he slams on the door one last time, hard, right next to her head. 

He calls her a bitch but they leave after that so she really couldn’t care less.  _ Bitch _ just means she got away in time.

She swipes her wrist over her nose, it would have grossed Stan out, the way it smears across her skin, and Eddie would have yelled at her for not tilting her head forward or back, she can never quite remember, but she likes this shirt and she doesn’t want to bleed on it. 

_ (Good luck with that, _ something thinks.) (She’s not in the locker room alone.)

The shower had turned off before she had even known it was running, which makes her yelp, and the plastic curtain rustles open just enough for the girl inside to pop her head out; grinning with half her mouth. It’s unsettling, a smirk but she’s using too many teeth.  Richie didn’t recognize her, which isn’t all that weird, Derry is small but people don’t tend to introduce themselves to Trashmouth Tozier. She was pretty in a Disney-princess conventional way; big,  _ big _ eyes and curly light brown hair (dry, it was dry even though she had just gotten out of the shower, but Richie ducked her head far too quickly to notice how wrong wrong _ wrong  _ that is). 

“Shit! Sorry I didn’t know anyone was in here!”

“Rachel Tozier.” She says her name like it’s something noteworthy, like she’s making some big claim but she doesn’t need to expand upon her point other than those two words. She says her name means something, though Richie can’t even begin to dream of what.

“Uh, it’s… Richie, actually.” She twists her half smile into something sharper. Richie suddenly feels a little like she’s prey, a bird boned little animal backed into a corner by a particularly pretty carnivore. Her canines  _ are  _ extraordinarily pointy. 

Unnervingly pointy.

“I know.” 

Part of Richie wants to ask why the fuck she called her  _ Rachel _ then, but she doesn’t, even she knows antagonizing weird, pointy teethed strangers you caught in the shower isn’t a good idea.

“Sorry, didn’t know this locker room was taken!” It’s a bad joke, the kind she only makes when she’s uncomfortable and awkward so she overcompensates by running her mouth. She forms her left hand into a little gun, pointer and thumb up and firing at the girl before she can stop herself, “Sorry, that was… stupid. I’ll go-”

“No. It was funny. Stay.” She doesn’t look like she thought the joke was funny, even though she _does_ look amused. It’s weird, the way her expressions don’t line up the way they should, naturally unnatural.

Richie doesn’t like the way the ‘stay’ felt like the kind of command you’d give to a particularly well trained dog.

“Were you  _ looking,  _ Rachel?” She almost corrects her again, tells her that really everyone calls her Richie, it just suits her better, when what she says catches up to her and her stomach drops so low she swears she can feel it in her knees.

“What? No! No, I wasn’t!” 

“You can if you want to, and I  _ know _ you want to.” She says it so calmly, like its okay, like any of this is fucking okay. For a moment she makes Richie feel normal, like she’s taking her hand and guiding her forward and saying it’s alright to be like her, it’s alright to look at girls the same way your friends want to look at guys. 

Then she opens the shower curtain and any good will sort of falls out of Richie’s mind as she snaps her eyes shut so tight it almost hurts, the sort of too tight scrunch that her mom used to say would ‘pop her eyeballs like balloons’ just to get her to stop doing it, though she thinks her mom would approve of it just this once, given the circumstances.

“Oh, come on, do it. Just sneak a peek.” Her tone is teasing, lined with something Richie has only heard in movies she isn’t supposed to go see, hiding under a blanket with her arm looped with Stan’s, Eddie against her knees hogging the popcorn bowl, and Bill sitting against the door of her basement so they’d know if her parents were coming downstairs. It’d been funny then, the on screen flirting and touching and innuendos that they all pretended didn’t just confuse them, too full of giggles at their big rebellion to think too hard on what they were seeing. 

This wasn’t funny. This wasn’t a movie, this was real life, and even in the movie none of the girls talked to other girls the way they talked to boys. The way this girl was talking to her.

“No! What the fuck are you talking about?” She laughs at her. She fucking  _ laughs _ and it just sounds so wrong. This strange girl, who is in the Derry Middle School showers even though she shouldn’t be, even though no one else was supposed to be in here, whose hair is dry even though it shouldn’t be, who is flirting with Richie even though  _ she shouldn’t be, _ just feels so wrong, all of it, just so  _ wrong wrong wrong. _

“You're a monster, Rachel, I know you are. You’re just like me. You want to look at girls, you want to kiss them, you want to  _ touch _ them, don’t you?”

_ “No!” _ (Sometimes she wants to hold Eddie Kaspbrak’s hand, in the moments when she's so bright and big and _brave_ despite the body she's stuck in that Richie feels like if she doesn't grab onto her she'll just explode into a supernova, but also in the moments where she's just as quiet and small and scared as she looks and Richie just wants to tell her she'll be okay . Sometimes she wants to kiss Stan Uris’ cheek, when she drags her out birdwatching and Richie can't be too noisy so she distracts herself with watching her watch the birds, when they have a sleepover and she wakes Richie up too late at night or too early in the morning because there's a cool constellation she wants to point out. 

Somehow she gets the nauseating feeling that this girl knows that, she doesn’t know how or why, and that scares her.)

“I can help you become what you are on the inside. You just need to embrace it, you’re a fucking freak. You… are… a… monster.”

The girl lets out a sound, inhuman and guttrally close to a growl, it's such a startling shift into something that sounds far more dangerous but Richie can’t help but feel the tiniest bit relieved that at least she isn’t being accused of something she’s terrified of being accused of anymore.

Then she looks up and all the relief fizzles out, everything feeling far too much like she’s taken a running leap out of a frying pan only to cannonball directly into a fucking housefire.

A long, snarling snout pokes closely near her face, yellowed, elongated canines dripping something blacker than saliva. 

Werewolf. 

It’s a  _ fucking werewolf. _

There is a werewolf in the Derry Middle School gym’s girl’s locker room and Richie all of a sudden can’t fucking breathe. She wonders, vaguely, if this is how Eddie feels when she has an asthma attack. Like something is pressing against her chest, crushing her lungs until they are flattened against her ribcage, helplessly thrashing for air that isn’t going to come.

She’d always known about fight or flight; Bill was a fighter, Stan was a flighter, and Eddie had always fallen somewhere in between, it was a pretty simple system, one she had never really questioned her understanding of. Evidently she should have because she hadn’t known freezing was an option.

She feels like her joints have been iced over, feet stuck to the floor by something invisible and cold that smelled a lot a lot a lot like she imagines death to.

It huffs out a wet breath, filling her nose, hot and rancid, clinging to her clothing and her hair, seeping into her fucking pores and she doesn’t think she will ever stop reeking of it, but it manages to melt whatever imaginary ice has kept her still and she ducks around it, praying it’s horrifying size will at least slow it down enough for her to escape.

There are three problems with that plan, apparently.

**_Problem One:_** **Werewolves are fucking fast.** She feels like an idiot for forgetting it as she gets all but tackled to the floor, it’s basically werewolf 101, one of the main reasons she’d been so terrified of them in the first place. You can’t get away, they can track you, they can chase you, they can _kill you._

 ** _Problem Two:_** **Richie is, emphatically,** ** _not_** **fucking fast.** See above for how quickly she got caught. See the past twelve years of her life, see how often she’s gotten beaten up by bullies because she couldn’t outrun them, see how many races she’s lost to her friends. Her limbs are too long for her body, her mom likes to call her a baby giraffe based on how clumsily she maneuvers the world on them. Clumsy and slow isn’t ideal when running for a creature with enhanced _speed._

 ** _Problem Three:_** **She locked the door.** She locked the fucking door and she has nowhere to go even if she was fast and the wolf was slow. Which they aren’t. She’s going to die.

It’s on top of her, kneeling sharply on her thighs and clawed paws crushing her wrists down, it doesn’t matter how hard she thrashes against its grip, she’s not nearly strong enough to get away. 

_ “Come on Rachel Tozier, gimme a kiss.” _ It warbles, sounding pained, sounding like a creature that isn’t supposed to be able to talk forcing out words.

_ “This isn’t real. This isn’t real. This isn’t real.”  _ She sobs out to herself, and the corners of the monster’s lips curl up unnaturally high, for a moment it almost seems like the teeth curl above it’s eyes, red slashes curving up both sides of it’s face, but that might just be the fear.

“Oh, Richie, I’ll show you how real I can be.” It releases one of her sides so it can drag it’s claws, slow and deep and fucking painful, up her inner thigh. It gets the point across, she’s more terrified than she thinks she’s ever been in her life, because her thigh is  _ burning and dreams don’t hurt, _ but it’s also cocky, careless and preformative, it gives Richie’s suddenly freed hand a chance to fight back. 

It’s now or never.

She remembers, blurry through the adrenaline, being told that a dog’s snout is sensitive enough that hitting it hard enough will make it go away, no matter how big it is (retrospectively that's a fact she read in a book about Sharks she’d been obsessed with in third grade, but that doesn’t really matter, not when in the moment she fully believed that it was a fact about dogs, belief tends to be so much stronger than fact in circumstances like this). 

She wraps her hand into a sloppy fist, thumb tucked inside, wrist bent, and wails it hard against the werewolf’s snout.  It lets out a pathetic, sharp whimper, recoiling long enough for Richie to scramble away and army crawl under the line of shower stalls.

She leaves a smear of blood behind her from her thigh, trying to swallow back her whimpers as the rough tile scrapes against the slashed skin. She finally gets to the back corner of the last shower, drawing her knees to her chest and pressing a hand hard to the claw marks trying to staunch the bleeding, knowing hopelessly it isn’t going to work. If the werewolf doesn’t kill her blood loss will. She’s going to die in Derry, Middle school, hiding out in a stall that reeks thickly of mildew and the coppery tang of her own blood.

She bites hard on her lip and tries to choke back her sobs. One by one the showers turn on,  _ click chss, click chss, click chss, _ closer and closer until cold water is raining over her like a terrible omen about what's to come. The ironically apt sign that the momentary calm before the storm has ended. 

_ “Gotcha!” _ A blur of black and teeth and shining yellow eyes lunges through the moldy plastic curtain, her arm suddenly stings, the sharp burn of fangs buried deep into skin. Over the inky all consuming terror that rushes in her ears before she passes out completely (whether it’s from fear or pain, she doesn’t know, honestly it's probably just her body shutting down because it can’t do anything else) she hears a gleeful,  _ “Beep beep, pup!” _

_**-** _

When she wakes up there’s a janitor prodding her with the handle end of his broom, eyeing her thigh in a way that makes her wanna slam her foot out into his ankles and run away until she remembers the  _ painfully deep claw marks down her leg. _ Actually, remembering that almost makes the urge worse because, if she’s being entirely honest, she’s not even sure that's why he’s staring.

He asks her what the hell she’s doing here and when it’s clear she’s only really capable of blinking helplessly at him he huffs and offers her a hand that feels far too rough in her own. In fact, everything feels a little  _ too much _ right now, she just hadn’t quite realized until she stood. She’s  _ dizzy _ with the muchness, the lights are too bright and the dripping of leaky shower faucets is too loud and the janitor  _ reeks _ of chewing tobacco, overwhelming in it's earthy sweetness that it’s almost sickly enough to make her puke. He doesn’t ask if she’s okay, just tells her to get herself home and she’s more than happy too, because she needs to get the fuck out of this locker room  _ right now. _

So, she takes the advice of a creepy man who stared at her unconscious body for perhaps a bit too long, which she is sure one would normally categorize as ‘unwise’ but when has she ever proved to be anything different, and she goes home. 

Maggie and Wentworth Tozier both were born in Derry, raised in Derry, lived in Derry, and would get the fuck out of Derry the second their daughter graduated high school (not that they quite knew about that yet). Therefore, when Wentworth’s late father willed him his childhood home, it wasn’t much of a move to simply shift all their stuff from the apartment they had been staying in into the house that was too big for them. 

They liked to say they grew into it before ruffling their daughter’s hair and blatantly ignoring all the empty ‘guest rooms’ they had planned to fill with family members who never came to visit and other children they never managed to have, ignoring the basement no one goes into even if they don’t know why (if you asked Wentworth Tozier perhaps he would remember one day, 27 years ago, seeing the twisted, glowing eyed image of Black Adam from his newest Captain Marvel comic, the one that scared him so much he kept it hidden under his mattress, grinning up at him from the base of the stairs asking him if he wanted to learn how to  _ fly, or, no, better yet, how about you learn how to  _ **_float_ ** , but more likely you probably would just get a shrug and I slightly hesitant ‘I don’t know’).

Richie loves her house, really, she does! It’s the ideal sleep over house behind Bill’s, and, well, now she supposes she’s probably managed first place, Bill’s house is full of too many ghosts now.

(Ex.

  1. Georgie
  2. Pictures of a family who knew how to be functional
  3. Her parents; The last two are still alive but they might as well not be)



But, to be fair, it’s not as though she’s found an appropriate moment to confirm that theory.

Her house is big and old and interesting and her  _ house. _ The same house that as a little kid she’d declared stubbornly that she would never move out of, before hitting double digits and realizing that not moving out of her home meant not living out of Derry and she’s not willing to sacrifice that for almost anything.

Her house is great and her parents didn’t even need to pay a mortgage on it so it was barely even their choice to live there.

That being said she would like to fight her parents, burn their home to the ground, and move to the constantly vandalized, constantly complaining to a homeowners association who couldn’t give less of a shit, constantly full of disgruntled old people condos directly outside of the school property. 

Because outside is so much  _ worse  _ than the locker room. Everything is  _ too fucking much. _ It’s like her senses have been violently thrown into high gear and she can’t think about anything other than  _ loud and bright and run run run. _

She listens, she doesn’t know if she’s capable of not listening to them, claps her hands over her ears and books it down the street faster than she had ever been capable of running before; away from the locker room and all of it’s monsters, past a horrified little Lilly Thornberry’s bedroom window (unaware that in three days the very same creature who attacked her would morph itself into her. More accurately: the blurry, blood covered, desperate, version of her a six year old would perseverate on, wrists fused to the side of it’s new curly black hair, sobbing just outside Little Lilly Thornberry’s window- she just knows Little Lilly Thornberry’s missing poster shows up tacked to the corkboard outside the grocery store over the weekend), through her front door, past all of the empty guest rooms and the basement no one ever goes into, and deep under her covers until she can shove her pillows on either side of her head and get everything to just  _ shut up. _

She almost wishes she’d let the sounds and smells and lights overwhelm her for longer because once their gone, not drowned out but  _ muffled  _ by her locked door and blankets, she’s more than aware of the tight lines of skin stitched shut, deep and sloppy up her leg, the indented, closed up circle of teeth marks on her arm.

Scars. New ones, silvery and fresh and completely  _ healed. _

The memory of what had happened, the teeth and the claws and the accusations, suddenly come rushing back, just as strongly as the noise had.

Stan Uris would have made a list; a neat little one printed in her specific, bright blue covered ‘list making’ notebook that she had, just because she was the kind of person who claimed crossing things off a To-Do list or jotting reminders into organized, numbered little lines was relaxing.

But Richie was never one for physical list making, and in her defense, she’d had quite the day and no one could have expected her to get out of the first place she’d felt safe in hours to get enough  _ scrap paper _ to sort out whether or not her life is completely ruined or not.

It’s really not much of a checklist anyway, and instead a pile of problems that topples into one, obvious outcome.

_ Enhanced Senses and Super Speed and Speed Healing and Claw MarksandBiteMarksandWerewofWerewolfWerewolfSheIsAWerewolfSheIsAWerewolf _

_ She _

_ Is _

_ A _

_ Werewolf. _

She thinks she might puke. Instead she passes out for the second time in one day. It’s most definitely not recommended, but she’s done a lot of things that aren’t recommended today, like get chased by angry bullies with pocket knives and lose excessive amounts of blood before your wounds can miraculously close on their own and fall asleep in torn jeans coated in that very same blood and  _ possibly get turned into a werewolf. _

So she cries until her mom knocks on her door later that night to tell her dinner is ready when she pretends to be asleep, and then once she’s gone, she cries some more.

She thinks it’s well deserved.

**-**

“Did you hear Rachel Tozier started her period and fainted?” Richie froze from where she was slicing sloppy stripes through her orange cafeteria Jello. 

She hadn’t really felt like eating since yesterday, she’d played that card dramatically this morning, feeling drained and disgusting and sticky from the dried blood she’d scrubbed clean from herself in the shower when she’d finally woken up at four in the morning and hadn’t been able to fall back asleep. Her mother had raised an eyebrow at her still bloodshot eyes and her arms wrapped around her stomach at the breakfast table and told her fondly that the same excuse wouldn’t work on her twice.

She feels like an entirely different person from that girl who had pushed away a bowl of cereal and played sick so she could skip an English test. It had only been a month ago but somehow she thinks that girl had some sort of innocence and hope in her that she’s terrified she will never get back, not after yesterday.

If Stan could read her mind she’d tease her for being overly melodramatic, but Stan  _ can’t _ read her mind and she thinks wallowing is justified.

Her senses have mellowed out, thank  _ god, _ spiking in painful bursts throughout the day; right now it’s barely manageable, with sound from all angles and the combination of bright lights and big windows that make the Cafeteria too bright on a normal day.

It makes it all that much easier to hear what Greta Keene was saying, leaning conspiratorially towards her friends the table over, hissing the way she tended to when she wanted to look like she was whispering but in reality was trying to let the whole school know her newest bit of gossip. Her newest, absurdly misguided bit of gossip. 

Richie’s friends looked at her (half of the Derry Middle School cafeteria looked at her) and her stomach twisted in anxious preparation as Greta popped her gum and glanced up to make pointed eye contact with Richie before resting her cheek on her hand and continuing.

“Yeah, well,  _ I heard _ that the janitor went to clean the girls locker room yesterday afternoon and she was just like… passed out  _ in the showers  _ with her pants covered in her own  _ blood. _ I know, it's so disgusting. Makes you wonder what she was even doing in the  _ girls locker room _ in the showers… you know, where girls don’t wear clothes. It was after hours and everything.” Greta Keene is a bitch. She’s such a fucking bitch and Richie hates her. It’s such an absurd way for an outsider to twist what had actually happened that she almost wants to laugh. The cafeteria dissolves into loud whispers; Richie is almost positive she can hear the word  _ dyke _ scattered through conversations between tables. 

At least, she thinks, so weakly that it barely registers, Greta telling people she got her period while she was being a pervert in the girl’s locker room is better than everyone knowing about what really happened. Mostly, though, the thought just makes her feel sick.

She lazer focuses on her lunch, hoping if she doesn’t draw attention to herself people will stop looking. It’s not working. She pokes more aggressively at her cut up Jello, jabbing it into orange slush with the end of her plastic fork, the handle indenting it’s shape into the white knuckled grip she has around it. 

“R-richie, you wuh-were buh-bleeding? Wuh-was it buh-becuase you got your period or-” Richie draws her gaze away from the sticky table top just long enough to watch Bill, wide eyed and slightly pale, struggle to find the words. It’s different than normal, when she’s stuttering it just sort of looks like her mouth can’t catch up with her brain, but right now both seem equally lost. Eventually she manages, quiet and shaky, “Did you see wuh-what t-took G-g-georgie? Did it at-t-ttack you?”

Her fork breaks through the bottom of her Jello container.

Yes. It’s got to be, right? The girl, the werewolf, whatever the fuck it was had enough teeth to rip off a little boy’s arm, it  _ had _ to be what got Georgie.

But if  _ thats _ what got Georgie than Georgie is fucking dead and Richie doesn’t like to think about that.

She doesn’t like to think about what the blood was really from either, the already healed claw marks left by the werewolf; four thick, jagged white lines connecting the top of her hip all the way into the inner corner of her knee. But it's almost as if she  _ can’t stop _ thinking about it. It healed too quickly to be entirely human. 

Not Human.  _ She’s _ not human. Fuck Fuck  _ Fuck. _

(There's the scar on her arm too but she guesses either that tidbit of gossip didn’t fit with Greta’s ‘gross Richie passed out because of her first period’ narrative, that, or the janitor had said there was blood and everyone had made their own assumptions about where it came from.)

But it’s not like she can tell her friends any of that without letting loose the fact that she might be the same kind of monster that killed Georgie.

“Don’t be fucking dumb, Bill, I just… started my period. It was gross and hurt so I passed out, it’s whatever.” 

“Oh. L-lucky you, then.” Bill had a weird obsession with getting her period since she’d read  _ Are You There God it's Me, Margaret  _ two years ago and fell so completely in love with it that she’d passed her copy around their friend group and demanded they all read it. So, because Bill asked them to, obviously they did. Stan had gotten through it and deemed it ‘just okay’, passing it onto Eddie who had gotten a chapter in before her mother snatched it to read the back and subsequently tore it to tiny, ‘sacrilegious’ pieces. Richie had never gotten the chance to read it, much like she had never gotten her period and wouldn’t until she was thirteen. 

(Margaret wasn’t a werewolf, though, so the book doesn’t really matter in this specific circumstance. Or, at least, she doesn’t think she is, she can’t be sure but it had never seemed nearly that exciting.)

“My mom says only whores get their periods before they're at least fifteen.” Eddie comments helpfully from over her sugar free apple juice box, choking on the little plastic straw when Stan kicks her hard under the table,  _ “What? _ I was just saying!”

“T-twelve is the average age to g-g-get it-” Bill corrects, rattling it off with the quick precision of someone who has done research before Richie cuts her off.

“Well, you’re mom would know all about me being a whore, wouldn’t she, Spaghetti?” She wiggles her eyebrows and hopes her impression of ‘a completely stable girl who just got her period and has no chance of being a werewolf’ is good enough to fool them. If Bill's chocolate-milk-spraying-through-her-nose laughter and Eddie’s disgusted  _ ‘Beep beep, asshole!’  _ are anything to go by, she’d say she’s putting on a pretty convincing performance, even though the way Stan is squinting thoughtfully at her across the table is somewhat worrying. Stan’s always been harder to trick.

Someone throws a pad at their table. It’s crumpled up, something scrawled in thick black letters on the inside Richie doesn’t have chance to read before Eddie is whipping around to yell at the table it had came from and Stan is grabbing it, folding it neatly in a napkin so she doesn't need to actually touch it as she gets up to throw it away, Bill glaring at the whole of the cafeteria like she’s daring them to try and pull something else.

It’d all be very valiant if Richie was actually traumatized from a period-based experience and not a fucking  _ werwolf attack, _ but still it makes something warm burst in her stomach.

Stan grabs her arm once the bell rings, slipping them both into the rush of students so they get split up from Bill and Eddie who have been scooting closer to Richie and looking over her shoulder since halfway through lunch when everything went down like a pair of tiny, tenacious watch dogs.

She tugs her behind the vending machine by her upper arm, wrinkling her nose at the soda-sticky floor and stench of snuck cigarettes, keeping her hand firmly wrapped around the healed over bite scar. Richie wants to shove her off, she’s too good too clean too perfect to come in contact with anything to do with the monster now living inside her, she’s fucking terrified she’ll be able to infect her solely due to proximity. 

“You didn’t start your period. What's wrong?” Stan whispers, finally letting go of her arm and tugging, frustrated, at a loose lock of hair that’d slipped from her neat ponytail.

“How do you know? Maybe I did!”

“You tell me everything, I would have known before Greta fucking Keene if you passed out and woke up in a pool of menstrual blood, dipshit.” 

She’s not wrong, she and Stan function under what could loosely be called a need to know absolutely everything basis. She had been invited over immediately when Stan’s mom bought her first training bra so she could be informed on exactly how stupid Stan thought the whole idea of wearing a bra before you really needed it was and Richie snuck into her aunt’s bedroom during a family reunion to call Stan the second it became apparent her whole family though this Bill she talked about was her  _ boyfriend; _ Richie knew that sometimes Stan doubted her father and his big, detailed plans for her, Stan knew that Richie sometimes thought her parents would like her better if she brushed her hair and wore pretty dresses and was polite and quiet. Stan would have known if Richie started her period, “Richie, really, are you okay?”

She hates lying to Stan, it makes her feel uneasy and itchy, like the lies and kept secrets are struggling to burst out of her skin, but some things need to stay secret like the bite mark on her arm and the scar on her thigh and a pretty, naked girl saying that she knows Richie wants to look.

“I’m fine, I promise.” Stan looks unconvinced, squinting at her hard before readjusting her backpack straps and crossing her arms tightly over her chest, “Come on, Stan, we gotta get to class.”

“Fine. Tell me next time.” 

“I’ll leave used tampons on your window sill as a sign that my Aunt Flo is in attendance.” She brings her hand up and claps Stan twice on the shoulder, dripping with condescending sarcasm. Stan shoves her off.

“Fucking  _ gross, _ Rich, you know what I mean!” She does know, but it’s so much easier to be a shithead than try to be sincere, it’s what's always worked and even now, when everything is so crooked, it helps the world regain it’s hold on it’s axis.

“Come along ye young lassie, the time for learnin’ is near!” She thinks she’s doing an Irish accent, and though she’s never actually heard one, she would have to say that the execution is probably incredibly masterful. Stan snorts, though it looks as though it’s the sort of amused outburst she hadn’t wanted to give Richie the satisfaction of hearing, looping her arm through Richie’s when she extends it, offering it like a real gentleman.

“Do you think Greta pays off the janitors to get gossip?” Stan speculates halfway down the hall. They’ve passed both their classrooms and Richie isn’t sure if Stan is intending to skip this period to lap the halls with her arm intwinted through Richie’s own, it’d be an incredibly out of character move and she’s beginning to wonder if she just hadn’t heard the second bell ring. She is absolutely not going to ask, this is the most normal she’s felt all day and she’s not going to risk breaking that.

“I have a theory that she just has a plethora of incredibly detailed costumes that she cycles through like a super spy so she can experience all of it first hand.”

“Ah, well that all depend on whether or not the janitor who found you reeked of watermelon bubble gum.” Stan grins at her, and for a moment Richie’s steadfast belief that Stan is unaware that she’s skipping class starts to slip. 

“You know what, Staniel? I do believe he did.”

_**-** _

Her parents have been watching her weirdly closely for the past few days, which she guesses is fair. She’s been acting off since everything went down, not that she meant to, it was just incredibly fucking hard to try and be normal when your pretty sure you’re part dog now.

Things have calmed down at school, at least, Jonathan Wrigler pissed his pants on the bus home from a field trip for Symphonic Band and that seemed to take precedence over her ‘period’. 

(It was apparently going to take more than a seventh grader who played the trumpet drinking too much orange soda before boarding a bus to forget the nastier parts of Greta’s rumors though. The maybe-true parts. She hadn’t known the word  _ lesbian _ could feel quite so dirty.)

All that being said, she’s not that surprised when her mom knocks on her door with a bowl of pre-popped popcorn and a bag of M&Ms, asking if she wants to watch  _ Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Arc. _

It’s their tradition, when one of them has a particularly bad day, to mix the candy into the popcorn and watch  _ Indiana Jones _ and then completely ignore it in favor of trying to dodge the conversation around what was bothering them, if you were the one bothered,  _ or, _ trying to drag it out of the other, if you were the one to call the movie night into action. They could quote the movie word for word anyway after years of said tradition, they weren’t really missing much.

Usually, however, the things Richie doesn’t feel like talking about that spur a movie night are normal middle school things, a test she did poorly on, a friend she was fighting with, something rude Mrs. Kaspbrak had said to her face; and more often than not Richie secretly, really did want to talk to her mom about it, she just needed motivation.

This is a different circumstance entirely and they can both tell as they sit in semi awkward silence, whispering lines under their breath and sharing snacks with a practiced ease.

“Honey, we really need to start talking about shaving your legs more regularly.” Her mom breaks the silence as Marion’s bar burns to the ground on the screen in front of them. She yanks her leg out from under the blanket they’d been sharing, dislodging the popcorn bowl she’d had carefully balanced on her right knee. If she’s being completely honest it’s partially her fault, the way the red ceramic bowl tumbles off the couch arm and rolls pathetically across the carpet, leaving a trail of buttery-yellow popcorn and half melted multi-colored candy in its wake, she lets herself go ragdoll limp, dramatically flopping her lower half into her mother's lap as she tugs at her ankle.

“Do we  _ really _ have to start talking about that?” She asks a little helplessly and Maggie nods, softly poking at her calf before dropping it.

“It’s a little gross, don’t you think?” Her nose wrinkles and Richie’s heart does the same twisted up, painfully fast excuse for beating it had taken on everytime someone reminds her just how  _ wrong _ she is these past few days. 

She doesn’t really mind it, the new leg hair that seems to regrow hours after she tries to get rid of it. She’s just taken to wearing jeans at school where people would tease her if she didn’t, it wasn’t something that bothered her anywhere else.

Except for, of course, when she actually thought about  _ why _ it was there in the first place. 

Of all the werewolfish traits she’d expected to to develop hairy legs hadn’t really been the one she’d thought would show up first. (To be fair, though, a small, optimistic part of her had hoped that perhaps she was a fluke, the first ever werewolf bite that had just lived her life afterwards, fully human. If she’s being entirely honest she hadn’t  _ actually _ expected anything to happen at all.) It made sense, but in her defense, all the werewolves she’d read about in comic books or seen in movies had been big, burly men who very well could have been hairy before they got turned.

“I like it!” She defends weakly, “Shaving is a sexist ideal set by men and the cosmetic industry to make women feel worse about themselves.”

It’s not her own words, she’s really just parroting one of Bill’s impassioned, gummy candy and lemon lime soda fueled, three in the morning at a sleepover rants she’d heard far too many times. The speeches always made more valid points than they didn’t,  _ Bill _ always made more valid points than she didn’t, especially at sleepovers when it was just the four of them and she wasn’t self conscious of her stutter because she knew no asshole was going to come along and cut her off or finish her sentences. The speeches were overall relatively educational and entertaining, regardless of if all of them tended to have their own, strong, differing opinions one one topic or another (Star Wars was  _ not _ better than Star Trek and the angrily kicked to be slightly crooked back left leg of Bill’s coffee table would always act as a reminder on that  _ inarguable fact). _ Her mother nods, slow and considering, before reaching out to squeeze around her knee with both hands.

“Alright, I can dig it, you know I  _ was _ a bit of a hippie in my day, darling!”

“Yes, Margaret, I’m aware.” Her mother has a tendency to reminisce, like the shenanigans she got into when she was in her twenties were a surefire way to relate her to her twelve year old daughter (it hadn’t worked well before, but her mother and father ‘smoking fun cigarettes’ and swimming topless in the ocean after skipping their last day of classes their senior year had even less of a meaning trying to help her now, twelve and scared and fifty percent less human than she had been a month ago which was the last time she’d started a story with ‘you know I  _ was _ a bit of a hippie in my day-’).

“Don’t knock it till you try it, you little brat! In fact, the only reason you  _ exist _ because of one of those hippie-”

_ “Mom! _ Shut the fuck  _ up!” _ She whines, ripping the blanket off both their legs to bury her face in it.

“Alright, alright, you know, you  _ can _ talk to me about…  _ normal puberty  _ things like this whenever you want to, right?”

Here is what Richie thinks:  _ No. No, I can’t, because you won’t know how to help because none of this is ‘normal’ puberty problems, not unless everyone gets cornered and turned in their middle school’s locker room showers when they are twelve and you just forgot to tell me. I want to tell you, I want to tell you  _ **_so bad._ ** _ But I can’t, because I can’t risk you hating me. I can’t risk you thinking your daughter is a monster. _

Here is what Richie says: “Of course I know that Mom, don’t be dumb.”

**_-_ **

She doesn’t won’t  _ can’t  _ change in the girl’s locker room anymore, her friends shoot her worried looks when they hear about it and someone starts up a rumor that she got banned from it for watching other girls change (the wolf said she should look but she doesn’t  _ want to she won’t she can’t) _ but she’s not really sure how the fuck she can explain in a way that will dispel both the rumors and her friend’s concern _. _ So she just block both out and shoves her gym clothes at the bottom of her backpack, laughing along when Eddie jokes between anxious glances that at least she’s washing them consistently now. 

The bathroom halfway across the school has cramped stalls and the older girls who skip class in there give her weird looks before neatly printing something rude on the door of the stall she just changed in but it doesn’t smell like fur and blood and fear, so she doesn’t really mind.

Well, she does mind, every time she awkwardly tugs her clothes on in the tight space she keeps her head tilted awkwardly up to the ceiling, her morbid curiosity not nearly strong enough to try and seek out her name in the messages on the back of the stall door. 

Derry Middle School’s eighth grade class is pretty small (Derry is pretty small, point blank period) but they still tend to split the grade into thirds for each period so there aren't fourty kids to one teacher.  There are downsides and upsides to only having three friends with this system, some classes just happen to work out where all four of them get put in together, like English, so they can constantly swap off for partner projects and no one has to be stuck with one of their shithead classmates who will make them do all the work. 

However, the reverse of that and the biggest crime of the system is that sometimes someone gets stuck in a class  _ all alone. _ They’ve all had it happen to them, she has math last period with Bill and Eddie, which she thinks they like because she’s better at it than them and doesn’t mind if they copy off her. Stan got the shit end of the deal for that one and is all alone, which happens sometimes, she says she prefers it, that she gets in less trouble when she doesn’t have to babysit the three of them, but Richie knows she’s lying. Bill is stuck in her weird upper level writing class all alone, but thats her own damn fault, to be fair, as much as she tried to convince them it would be ‘fun’, she and, like, seven of their classmates are the only people would would voluntarily sign up to analyze Robert fucking Frost or some shit for a whole year. Eddie had health alone last year, which had been such a disaster Richie doesn’t even like to think about it.

And Richie has gym class all alone. 

Which to be fair, is fucking horseshit, gym is really the one class everyone  _ should _ be contractually obligated to get a friend to suffer with; but if Richie’s being honest, she’s sort of glad that she’s all alone, now at least.

Because she doesn’t like worrying her friends and gym is fucking hell on all her senses. Honestly she doesn’t think anyone noticed how much she’s struggling to get through the ninety minute period, it's the one class she actively tries to sink into the background for and apart from her friends no one in Derry really understands how Rachel Tozier works enough to worry.

As far as they're concerned it’s perfectly normal, weird Trashmouth behavior to shove her walkman headphones over her ears and walk circles around the gym floor with the other kids who never felt like participating.

She’s not entirely sure what mixtape she’s listening to right now, she’d forgotten she had gym until she was halfway out the door and in her hurry to meet her friends on time she’d sprinted up the stairs and grabbed the first one she could find. 

It’s a mess of songs, half of which she doesn’t even like, but it's  _ something. _ She’s found when the world gets too loud it’s better to destroy her eardrums with something she can control, it gets less overwhelming when she knows what's coming. 

The sounds of gym class are unpredictable, shouting and sneaker-squeaking and basketballs slamming into hardwood that can all build up to what feels like her head is concaving in around itself if she’s not careful.

It’s so much safer to crank up her walkman and let  _ Manic Monday _ by The Bangles concave her head in instead. At least The Bangles concave consistently.

The problem with this plan is Richie didn’t really consider what she was going to do when they had a substitute. 

Derry Middle School’s gym teacher is infamous in the fact that he has literally always been Derry Middle School’s gym teacher; you can ask any older sibling, faculty member, or parent who grew up in Derry about him and every time you’ll get the same exact response: ‘Christ, he still teaches there?’

Mr. Vento is ancient, Mr. Vento is harmless, and best of all Mr. Vento doesn’t give a singular shit. As long as you’re wearing sneakers and gym shorts you’re going to pass, even if you shove on headphones and circle the gym trying to stave off sensory overload every class.  Except, Mr. Vento also takes off one week of school every year around this time like clockwork to go stay in a motel in Bagnor for a couple days. He doesn’t even do anything, just sits in his room and walks around and goes to one nice restaurant the last night of his stay, he talks about it constantly, waxing poetic about it being a ‘nice change of pace’. 

(If thats what being old is like Richie never fucking wants to be old.

But that isn’t her problem right now.)

Her problem right now is six foot one, wearing uncomfortably short athletic shorts, with an affinity for blowing a little silver whistle like he took this job for the sole reason of bringing her to tears.

Her problem right now is Mr. James ‘I was clearly a student athlete who peaked in high school and then became a substitute teacher’ Riteman.  He’s the kind of asshole sub she hates with a passion: the kind who like to have a  _ lesson plan _ that they stick to and clearly think their job is more important than it is. 

She forgets about all that, though, she has a lot going on and gym class is really just the most and least stressful class of her day; it’s too goddamn loud and everytime she glances at the locker room she feels like her heart is going to beat all the way out of her chest, but she can also fully shut her brain down, and sometimes she gets so lost in the sounds and the light and the almost-fear that it feels like she’s blinks and the bell is ringing and the gym is empty and she’s late for her next class. 

It’s not her favorite experience, getting so overwhelmed she shuts down and works on autopilot for over an hour, but it could be worse so she’s not going to bother with trying to deal with it. Something, a something that sounds a hell of a lot like Eddie Kaspbrak, tells her she probably should have dealt with it over Mr. ‘Piece of Shit’ Riteman’s grossly wet voice demanding that she  _ ‘Participate, goddamnit’ _ as he yanks her headphones off, pulling at her ponytail in his effort, he only manages to tear at a few strands of hair but it fucking  _ burns. _

“What?” She manages, barely holding herself back from slamming her hands over her ears, she was right,  _ God, _ it’s so fucking loud in here. 

He tries to take the option of covering her frustratingly sensitive ears from her, not that he’s aware of exactly what he’s doing; shoving a basketball at her with more force than she personally thinks is necessary. She lets it hit her in the chest and bounce to the floor, too busy digging her nails too deep into her palms to try and distract herself from the mounting  _ muchness _ of her surroundings.

“Pick that up and get to shooting, Tozier. We’re going for three-pointers, good form, get it in the basket and maybe you’ll get your music back. I won’t have  _ slackers _ in  _ my _ class.”  _ What class? You’re a fucking substitute.  _ She wants to say; she’s sure there's a joke in there about balls she could be making, and if she had the energy to turn around she’d see half of her class is watching, waiting eagerly for her to make it.

But she’s so dangerously verging on the edge of a breakdown all she can manage is an incredibly hesitant, “No?”

A couple people snicker, each one burrows into her skull with more force than they should. Mr. Riteman’s face goes slightly purple as he bends down to scoop up the ball and shove her in front of the net.

And suddenly there’s a basketball in her hands. She doesn’t really remember grabbing it. There's a bird in the rafters of the gym. Someone is wearing tangerine scented perfume to try and cover up the fact that they haven’t washed their gym clothes in a while; it’s not working. _'M_ _ ax Haverly is going to ask Sadie Greene to the end of the year dance' _ and _'_ _ Isn’t Richie such a fucking freak, why won’t she just shoot it' _ and _'_ _ I hear Mr. Riteman is actually hooking up with Mrs. Bronley in between passing periods'.  _

Her ears are cold. That’s stupid to think about, the gym is always warm, too warm, by the end of the school year it gets downright humid, but her ears are cold without her headphones pressing too tight over them. 

She can still hear the music, Mr. Riteman hadn’t bothered to stop the tape, absolute asshole, and she can still _hear it_ under everything. There’s too much everything. The bird and the perfume and the whispering and the _loud loud loud._   
And under it all is the fucking _Bangles._

_ It's just another manic Monday. _

She can’t breathe. She can’t think. It’s too  _ much. _

_ (Woah, woah) _

“Make the goddamn  _ shot, _ Tozier.” What? Oh. Right. Basketball. She’s holding a basketball. How the fuck does her teacher fucking expect her to shoot it when everything is so  _ loud. _ Can’t he see how  _ bright  _ the lights are? She can barely see the basket. Theres too much going on, how the fuck does he expect her to  _ shoot it. _

_ I wish it was Sunday. _

“I…. I can’t.” __

_ (Woah, woah) _

“Just  _ do it.” _ Someone laughs, calls her something rude, but all of a sudden she can’t work out the brain power to translate what that something rude really means though. The sound has stopped being specific, it’s just  _ sound _ and she can’t tell if it’s worse or not.

Mr. Riteman grabs her shoulder and it fucking burns.

Stop touching her stop looking at her  _ stop stop stop. _

_ 'Cause that's my fun day. _

“Shoot the fucking  _ basket!” _

_ (Woah, woah, woah, woah) _

It hurts. Doesn’t he get that it  _ hurts? _

Everything is too much at once. Too bright too loud too much too much too much her brain feels like it’s melting and she almost wishes it would because then she wouldn’t have to be here with a basketball burning into her palms and her classmate’s laughter hissing into her fucking bones and Mr. Goddamn Riteman’s stupid fucking voice in her ear and hand that isn’t occupied by her  _ stolen goddamn walkman playing the stupid fucking Bangles _ pressing too hard too hard too hard into her shoulder.

_ My I don't have to run day. _

“Shut the fuck  _ UP!” _

She doesn’t mean to throw the basketball. She doesn’t. She thinks she means to drop it but she can’t  _ actually _ think hard enough to make a plan and she’s gripping it too hard to let it fall to the floor but she wants it out of her  _ hands. She’s so angry and she doesn’t want to be here she doesn’t want this fucking basketball. Get it  _ **_away._ **

The thin wood of the backboard shatters.

Someone screams.

_ “What the fuck.” _ Mr. Riteman lets go of her shoulder but it doesn’t bring any relief. She feels like she’s going to vomit.

For one blessed moment there is almost complete silence.

_ (Woah, woah) _

The class explodes behind her. If she was thinking clearer she wouldn’t have blamed them, what she just did was fucking insane, she just  _ shattered _ a thick-ass plywood backboard like it was  _ nothing. _

“What the  _ fuck.” _ Someone repeats, louder this time. It hammers into the backs of her eyes. She can’t  _ breathe. _

She runs. She doesn’t bother to grab her walkman, she doesn’t bother to grab her backpack, she doesn’t care that she’s still in her gym clothes or that she’s scrambling over broken pieces of wood to try and get the fuck out. She just  _ runs. _

And she can run pretty fucking fast now.

If she was cognizant enough to realize everything going on she might realize that everyone was going to be talking about this  _ forever. _ That whatever comfort she had about having gym alone because she wouldn’t stress out her friends with her concerning behavior wouldn’t matter because within minutes the entirety of Derry, Maine would know that Rachel ‘Trashmouth’ Tozier threw a goddamn temper tantrum so bad that she decimated a solid piece of wood with a half deflated basketball. 

They’d be worried. (Her friends, not Derry, Derry was physically incapable of caring enough about anything to properly worry.)

She might realize that her parents would get a call, and probably a bill, for a destruction of school property. She’d probably be grounded, and worse, she’d probably have to have a ‘serious family talk’ on whether or not she was actually okay.

She might realize that she destroyed part of the gym and cursed out a teacher and probably was going to have detention until she graduated  _ college. _

But right now she just needs everything to  _ stop. _

In a couple hours Eddie is going to find her, she’s freaky good at tracking them down, always has been, it’s why she was their navigator when they played pirates down by the barrens when they were little. She’ll curse her out in the panicked, a-little-too-mean way she tended to when she was  _ really _ concerned before noticing that Richie, face buried into the grass of the field just outside the quarry and hands clapped over her ears, is all but unresponsive. So she’ll shut the fuck up, and she’ll plop down next to her, playing with her hair and very, very quietly panicking over whether or not she’s okay until Richie manages to pry her way back into lucidity enough to get a hold of her senses and tell her unconvincingly that she’s  _ Okie-Dokie, Spaghetti, your mom was just a little too rough with me last night, those adrenaline crashes, man, they just really get you when you least expect it. _

But for right now she’s just running.

Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

Stop. Stop, Stop, Stop.

_ It's just another manic Monday. _

**_-_ **

Richie smells blood one day while they’re walking. Her senses are something she’s been actively trying to get more used to since the disaster of a gym class that somehow has sent the  _ Lesbian Richie _ rumors back into the gossip circle of Derry with a fervor; but they’re still weird, they’re still uncomfortable and inhumanly strong, she can just  _ sort of _ stave off overload and differentiate scents a little bit better now after a few late nights with her head shoved in her kitchen garbage can (which had been hard to explain to her father when he walked downstairs to get a glass of water) and one particularly long afternoon at the Bagnor mall, a garbage can of scents and sights in it’s own right, trying to get her glasses prescription updated (Her mom is still confused about how she’d needed a  _ lower _ prescription, Richie had just been annoyed that  _ super were-senses _ weren’t enough to entirely fix her garbage eyesight).

But she smells blood and luckily her friend’s don’t ask many follow up questions about why she was dragging them down a random alley after they see the source of said blood smell.

It's New-Girl-Ben, natural bullying magnet for her weight and ‘boy’s name’, bent against the alley wall, breathing heavily and close to tears, a copper smeared  _ H _ carved through her dress to her stomach. 

Eddie panics, insults one of Richie’s stellar voices, and then leaves her with the bleeding girl, because Richie can’t think of a way to explain why the pungent copper scent of blood makes her unnaturally dizzy all of a sudden.

It’s sort of the expected outcome, in retrospect, but it doesn’t take long for her to realize over her nausea she has not a single fucking clue how to make conversation with this girl.

“I’m glad I got to meet you before you died.” She chokes eventually once the silence gets too awkward. She’s glad, momentarily, that her friends aren’t here, she’s not usually eloquent but this is almost overwhelming in it’s embarrassment.

Ben squints up at her, looking far too flattered for far too weak of a compliment. Richie leans her back against the wall and slides down it, wrist crossed as she props her elbows on her knees and sort of nudges her shoulder against Ben’s. Her cheeks flush pink and she buries her face in her chest for a moment before looking up and removing one blood soaked hand from her stab wound, offering it to Richie.

“I’m Ben Hanscom, I’m glad I got to meet you too!” If her hearing wasn’t enhanced she wouldn’t have heard the pained hiss around her words, overshadowed by her ingrained positive politeness. Richie grins, grabbing her fingertips and resecuring her hand back onto her stomach.

“I know dude, it’s a dope name. Richie Tozier, by the way, probably don’t remove pressure from your stab wound.” Ben snorts, the corners of her lips turning up halfway through, looking almost as though no one had ever told her ‘Ben’ was a cool name, which Richie thinks is a crime.

“I… I change out of the locker room too. We could, um, we could go to the bathroom together after lunch and walk to the gym together.” Ben blurts to cut off the reapproching awkward silence; painfully awkward and already pink cheeks starting to burn crimson quickly, like the very concept of putting herself out there and being rejected was already fucking with her.

“You’re in my gym class?” 

“Yeah… yeah, I am.” Richie hadn’t noticed her, something Ben clearly knows now and doesn’t look nearly surprised enough about, which is sort of making herself feel like a complete asshole. Though, if Richie knows anything about the new kid, she’s good at blending into the background, so she doesn’t let herself focus too hard on it before trying to run damage control.

“I just sort of meant, um, you’re in my gym class  _ and _ you still wanna hang out with me?” She thinks about the influx in rumors of her sexuality, she thinks about the backboard of the basketball hoop shattering; if she was Ben she definitely wouldn’t want to be involved with the maybe-gay freakshow.

“Yeah! You’re cool! But I mean, only if you want to!” Ben, as it so happens, is a much better person than she is.

“That’d be noice Benjamina, real, real noice.” Her cockney accent isn’t her best, her friends would argue none of them were, but it makes Ben start laughing. It’s bright and breathy, makes her feel warm, it's a little pained but other than a pat on her shoulder she can’t do much for her. 

Bill, Stan, and Eddie’s scents get closer, she hasn’t really been able to specify people by scents too easily yet, the whole world is still just a nauseating mess of smells that makes her head spin, but she finds smaller groups, her friends  _ especially, _ have something familiar and strong surrounding all of them when their together, which can help her pick them out one by one. 

Her friends are rubber bike tires mixed with a  _ more _ that makes Bill and English breakfast tea mixed with a  _ more _ that makes Stan and antibacterial hand sanitizer mixed with a  _ more _ that makes Eddie. 

There's someone new with them though, which is throwing her off, cigarette smoke and cologne and  _ more, _ it's dirty and cloying and uncomfortable. That mixed with Ben’s overwhelming stench of blood spikes a pressure behind her temples, a headache she knows will mount quickly and stick around for days.

Mr. Cigarettes and cologne and something happens to be Beverly Marsh; which, in all honesty, is incredibly unexpected.  He beams at Ben which sends her into a flushing, stuttering mess, which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so fucking precious.  He leans next to Richie on the wall across the alleyway where she’d been banished as Eddie bandaged Ben, apparently she was too much of a ‘distraction’. She’d take more offense to it if it wasn’t incredibly true.

Bev nods at her with the kind of half-smile she’s pretty sure she’s watched Bill sketch in the margins of her notes (like a fucking  _ loser), _ before looking down and patting at the sides of his pants. Eventually he produces a somewhat crumpled, half empty, red-and-white box of Lucky Strikes, he tilts it toward her but she waves it away.

She’d started smoking two months ago; her and Bill had found a half burnt out cigarette butt in the barrens and passed it back and forth, giggling over how  _ cool _ they felt. She tended to spend too much of her allowance at the arcade to actually buy her own but sometimes she’d trade older kids homework answer for a pack (it normally fell closer to like two-thirds of a pack, but she’d learned quickly that complaining about it was a good way to get punched). Smoking made her feel older, the coolness she’d bragged about with Bill to Stan and Eddie after that afternoon never really faded. 

Well, until a fucking werewolf apparently cleared her goddamn nasal cavity, and now the smell of the smoke is too strong to do much but make her want to puke.

“Greta’s a bitch, huh.” He offers brightly, pulling a cigarette out of the pack; he apparently notices her preemptive wince (God, it just smelled  _ so fucking bad), _ leveling her with a somewhat bemused smile before shoving the cigarette back into the box and and pocketing it. 

She’d forgotten about Greta’s constant torment of Beverly Marsh, the rumors that circulated around the school about his financial situation, about how much of an asshole he was; a horny player who would sleep with any girl he got his creepy hands on. Richie had always disregarded those, he’d been in her math class the year they’d started up and he’d always just been friendly; actually he was awkwardly polite, but that might have had something to do with his desperation to prove the rumors wrong now that she thought about it. Also, he’d put away his cigarettes when it was clear they made her uncomfortable, she doesn’t know many womanizing douchebags who would do something like that.

“Does she hate you because you turned her down?” She asks, because she’d always wondered and she had always been bad at knowing whether questions were rude or not, never knew if she was prying too closely or crossing a line, but his face just splits into grin, sardonic at the edges.

“Still gets flustered when I flirt with her though, that’s actually how we stole the stuff.” Richie cackles offer a low fist bump he happily reciprocates, “So… she knows about your… period?”

It’s the most awkward, boyish bullshit she’d ever heard, it’s almost hilarious how uncomfortable he looks, unsure of how on Earth to continue the conversation without accusing her of the terrible second half of Greta’s Richie-centric rumor, which apparently even dumb boys know is something you don’t bring up lightly.

“Think that’s hot? I mean, I get it, it’s pretty goddamn sexy that every month my uterus-”

“I’ll shut up now.” He chokes, red faced, and Richie snorts into his shoulder.

“You’re fine, I’m being a dick.”

“Fair enough, I was a dick first.” He takes out a bic lighter, twirling it around his fingers with a practiced coolness that Richie gets a feeling is just a disguise for how incredibly nervous he is. She grabs for it, trying her best to copy the motions and failing miserably, he laughs at her and guides her hands through it until she can do it with slightly more awkward ease. 

“Eddie! Eddie, come look at this!”

“I’m giving someone  _ medical attention, dickwad!” _

“ _ Boooo! _ Come on, Dr. K! This patient needs four CCs of your personal attention! Stat! I’m dying over here doc! I’m… I’m  _ dead. _ Bleh.” She heckles, lolling her tongue out of her mouth and collapsing her full weight against Bev who takes it as an opportunity to yank his lighter back, letting out a full belly laugh that has Ben goggling at him with her big, bright, hopelessly-in-puppy-love eyes and Bill glancing between Bev and Richie with poorly concealed almost-jealousy. Interesting.

She doesn’t quite blame them, Beverly Marsh’s full out laugh is brassy and loud, dazzling in a way she didn’t normally associate with men. It was the kind of laugh that left you warm and breathless and perseverating on it later when you’re feeling bad about yourself because at least you made Beverly laugh like that, even if it was just once. 

For a moment she gets it, Ben’s blush and Bill’s jealousy and Greta’s obsession, but it's not nearly enough to reassure her that she’s  _ normal. _ She wants to be Beverly’s friend, so just maybe she can get pulled into his orbit, revolve around his dazzley-ness, the same way all three of them orbit around Bill with blind devotion. 

But she doesn’t want to kiss Beverly Marsh and she thinks that makes a difference. 

They go to Ben’s house, once she’s patched up, h er room smells like old books and mothballs. (Everything still smells slightly bloody and Richie really doesn’t like how used to it she's getting.)

By the end of the day Richie knows more things about Ben Hanscom than her newness, like the fact that she’s genuinely kind, something that's refreshing and probably going to be crushed sooner rather than later under Derry’s oppressive heel right next to her bright eyes and earnest enthusiasm.

She learns that Ben Hanscom is completely and utterly gone for Beverly Marsh, that her mother probably works at the only decent diner in Derry if the familiar but still too strong scent of their fries and artificial-sweet strawberry milkshakes that hangs over the house is anything to go by, that she keeps a stack of Nancy Drew books on her bedside table, all with matching, faded blue tweed covers except for two shiny, new yellow ones kept on her desk like they’re exiled for not fitting in with the other ones, and that she has apparently coped with not having friends up until now by researching all of Derry’s history.

Derry’s history with children disappearing out of thin air, dead children, children who have turned up headless, limbless, bleeding from big, unexplainable wounds that the cops still explained away as animal attacks; all of these children murdered or missing like clockwork every twenty seven years.

Some from ‘possible animal attacks’.  _ Possible Werewolf attacks. _

No one seems to think much about it when she slumps onto Ben’s bed with an automatic, absent joke she barely hears, it’s just Richie being silly, rude, stupid  _ Richie, _ Eddie beeps her lightly and pokes close to a pinned up, photocopied newsprint, pointedly avoiding actually touching it like she’s scared the bad things from the story will start to spill out and grab her.

“So… what you’re fucking saying is  _ something _ has been, what? Attacking kids on a fucking  _ schedule? _ Do you know how  _ crazy _ that sounds?” Ben flushes with embarrassment, it’s a natural reaction to getting the signature Angry Edith Kaspbrak Squeak aimed in her direction, but it sort of makes Richie feel guilty.

Ben isn’t crazy, no, she’s  _ right _ and Richie knows it, she just can’t tell anyone.

If she did tell then she would need to explain exactly why she was so sure that werewolves have been the thing killing people in Derry for centuries, and that is never going to fucking happen.

_ (Please Note: Werewolves haven’t been the thing killing people in Derry for centuries. It’s a clown. It’s a monster. It’s the Eater of Worlds.  _

_ But Little Rachel Tozier, with her knobby knees and claw mutilated leg and nightmares about a middle school locker room she won't tell anyone about, she doesn’t know about said World Eater occupying the sewer under her sneaker soles. _

_ And, well, even if she did know, if Little Rachel Tozier was made aware that her werewolf could disappear in a puff of smoke and sewer water, what good would that do other than letting her know with absolute certainty just how alone she was?) _


	2. So the Big Bad Wolf Huffs... and she Puffs... and she... has a Panic Attack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, when you're twelve, the world seems like its out to get you, but then you find a leftover chocolate bar in the bottom of your backpack or something and everything is okay again.  
> And SOMETIMES you're twelve, and your name is Richie Tozier, so you like to do things in reverse, so you make new friends and everything seems okay, but then you find a leftover chocolate bar in the bottom of your backpack or something and have to wonder if eating it would fucking kill you because you're probably part dog now.  
> (AKA the full moon happens, amongst other things, and Richie has a bad time)

Richie can barely get up the back steps of Beverly Marsh’s apartments building before all her senses get flooded, the overwhelming coppery bitterness of blood rushing up her nostrils like she had pencil dived off the quarry without holding her nose and ice water _(and blood)_ rocketed into her sinuses so strongly it felt like it reached her brain. She’s dizzy with it. Bill prods the small of her back and whines that she’s blocking the stairs, to keep walking, but it’s staticky under the nausea of smelling so much of something she shouldn't be smelling at all.

“I- I think I’ll stay out here and keep watch. You know, in case his dad comes back?” She offers weakly, not even waiting for her friends to get out of her way before hooking one leg over the railing and awkwardly tumbling back into the grass. Bev nods down at her before focusing back on fishing his key out of his back pocket, but everyone else freezes where they’re standing to look down at her. 

“I don’t think that’s a great idea-” Eddie tries, nose wrinkled unpleasantly and hands immediately reaching down to worry at the zipper of her fanny pack.

“It’s a fucking _stupid_ idea, thats what it is.” Stan looks, for all intents and purposes, as though she’s planning on throwing herself over the railing to so she can sit with her and tell her just how stupid she thinks shes being, “What the fuck is... _bird bones_ over there even gonna do if his dad shows up?”

“Aw, Stanny compared me to a _bird,_ that sounds like a love confession to me, girls!” (Shut up, Richie. Shut up, Richie. Shut up, Richie.)

“I compared your _bones_ to a bird, dipshit, sure, I fucking love your _bones,_ hand ‘em over when you come back up her because you aren’t waiting outside alone.”

Richie really does understand where they’re coming from, even if there wasn’t a murderous shape shifter on the loose, being a girl in Derry tends to be a dangerous thing, but being a girl _alone_ in Derry is a disaster waiting to happen, there is a reason they travel in packs. 

Safety in numbers is something most girls in Derry learn to practice before they learn to ride a bike without training wheels.

“I’ll stay with her.” Someone near the base of the stairs pops up, stepping down the rusted metal steps with a decisive clang, the kind that reads big work boots on feet attached to the sort of legs they were always half-skipping, and coming to settle next to her. 

Michelle Hanlon. 

_Or,_ more specifically, Mike Hanlon, their brandy-newest Loser who has bright eyes and strong hands and smells so much like a farm it's a little overwhelming, but it's better than the scent of blood.

She’d joined up with their group yesterday, perhaps it was more accurate to say _forced in_ by some weird sense of loyalty after they’d saved her from the Bowers gang with a relatively unhinged rock war (where Richie had basically frisbeed a small, flattened stone so hard into Belch Huggins’ collar bone that she _fractured it, she’s not supposed to be able to fracture a kid’s collar bone with a fucking skipping rock, what the fuck),_ but Mike didn’t really seem to mind her unplanned indoctrination to the Loser ranks. In fact she seemed more enthusiastic about it than anything.

Stan glanced back at Bill (who grinned at Mike and started back up the stairs again now that the problem had been ‘solved’) and then down at Richie, carefully, like she was trying to look for something in her expression that she apparently finds quickly enough, shrugging and mouthing _be careful_ before carefully making her way up the steps and inside. 

Eddie lingers for a minute, glaring pointedly at Mike, who seems to take it in stride, before levelling it onto Richie, unzipping and rezipping her fanny pack in two loud, incredibly pointed strokes.

“Don’t let this dumbass do something stupid.” Richie really would love to think she was talking to her and just happened to know something about Mike she didn’t, but she knows better, and clearly Mike does too despite only having met her _yesterday._

“I won’t, don’t worry.” She says around a smile as Richie whines about not needing to be _babysat_ even as she flops across Mike’s lap and makes herself comfortable.

It still smells like blood out on the grass, but it doesn’t make her quite so sick to her stomach, especially when she’s sitting close enough to be surrounded by Mike Hanlon's more refined scent of cinnamon and orange and freshly tilled soil that comes through the general farmness once she’s close enough. It would probably be easier to block out the blood smell entriely if she wasn’t just sitting here with nothing to fucking do but search it out, like prodding at a bruise when you’re bored, she knew it would just be unpleasant but it wasn’t like she had anything better to do.

“I’m _bored,_ Michael.” Mike snorts, mouthing Michael like she's trying it out for size on her tongue before wrinkling her nose and whispering a firm _Mike_ automatically, sticking the nickname firmly in place almost subconsciously before turning fully to face her. She props her chin in her hand, not because she has any need to, Richie thinks, but just to emphasize her amusement.

“I’m sure they’d be more than happy to have another set of hands to help with the cleaning.” The coppery smell she’d managed to almost block out floods her sinuses again full force once she thinks of it, and apparently her expression is twisted up enough to make Mike laugh.

“That's not what I _mean.”_

“I know, I’m just messin’ with you. All this is crazy, huh.” She tries again, gesturing vaguely up the stairs before presenting her palms forward, like the whole town of Derry was a good enough example for her point, which quite honestly it probably was. 

“Crazy is fucking _understatement,_ whats _crazy_ is the mind blowing sex I had with your dad last night-” She says. To Michelle Hanlon. 

Michelle Hanlon whos parents died in a fire a couple years ago _so brutal_ that even Sonia goddamn Kaspbrak seemed a little disgusted by it as she openly discussed it with other parents in front of their children at the pick up line, “Oh fuck _,_ I’m sorry, I’m such an asshole-”

“You’re fine.” Mike waves her off gently, but her smile is tight around the corners, it’s incredibly clear that Richie is, in fact, not fine. She feels like she should apologize better, somehow, but she doesn’t really know the protocol for saying you’d fuck someone’s dead parent. Mike elbows her a little bit, a peace offering, “You know, whatever is doing this shit to us knows about them.”

“What?”

“My- It knows about my parents. I was walking down an alley and there were these burning arms coming out of a door trying to grab me. So, saying you fucked my dad isn’t as bad as that, you know?” Richie feels a little like she's going to puke, objectively she knew that if there was a thing out there that could be a werewolf and a bathroom full of blood all at once that it would have the capability to do some fucked up shit, but her imagination apparently has limits and actually hearing something quite so terrifying that had actually _happened_ is proving to be little bit more overwhelming than she’d expected.

“Jesus Christ, Mike.”

“Yeah.”

“Is it shitty to say that made me feel less bad about fucking up?” She blurts before she can really think about it but Mike levels her with an easy grin.

“Thought it might, that's why I said it, so really it’s only a _little_ shitty.” She presses her thumb and forefinger close together to signify just how shitty she thought Richie had been before quickly reaching the fingers out to flick her on the shoulder.

“Goddamn Mikey, that's cold.” She makes a big show of rubbing the area that had been flicked, trying subconsciously to lighten the tension of her slip up but all it gets is a weak chuckle out of her new friend as she folds her arms behind her head against the wall and closes her eyes.

“What about you?”

“What?”

“Has whatever it is done anything to you? Sorry, I don’t know if that's overstepping.” She doesn’t say the last part quite like an apology or a question, just a statement they both let hang in the air between them for a moment because neither is really quite sure. 

But if Richie knows anything, though quite honestly the situation never had really come up before, when someone asks you a question after telling you about being traumatized by the illusion of their _dead parents in the process of burning alive_ trying to _grab them,_ it’s really fucking shitty of you not to tell the truth.

“Yeah, it, uh, it showed me a werewolf.” It did so much more than just _show_ her a werewolf but nowhere in the politeness rules of reciprocating a trauma story with one of your own does it say you need to go into _detail._

“Woof.”

“Literally.” Mike snorts, looking a bit put out she hadn’t made the pun on purpose. 

“You know, I know it’s my fault but discussing emotionally scarring events wasn’t really what I meant by ‘I’m bored’,” She offers eventually and Mike sort of flushes, managing to look bemused and embarrassed all at once which really wasn’t her intention, “Wanna play sticks?”

“What?”

“Sticks?”

“Is this another dick joke?” Mike asks, the corners of her lips twitching between up and down like she’s deciding whether she wants to give it a pity laugh or not, Richie would take offense to it if she wasn’t quite so appalled.

“You’ve really _never_ played sticks?” Mike just barely shakes her head, “Holy _shit,_ Homeschool, your education has been _failing you,_ give me your fucking hands.”

“Why?”

_“Homeschool-”_ She whines, hands out and fingers wiggling in a way that some may be generous enough to call enticing, Mike included, apparently, because she reluctantly slots her hands on top of Richie’s, “Thank you, kindly, Miss Michelle,” she isn’t fully clear on what accent she slips into there, just that it makes Mike laugh, and that's good enough for her, “Okay, both of us start with one finger up on both hands and the _objective_ is to try and get all of the other person’s fingers up.”

Mike picks the game up quickly, not that it’s complicated and she seems pretty goddamn clever. It’s easy to get into the rhythm, mindless and monotonous and comforting in the distracting powers of boredom.

Richie taps Mike’s remaining hand with her pointer and middle finger, two fingers plus the three already up makes five and she flips her off as she tucks it behind her back to join the other one, Richie wins.

Mike pokes Richie’s pointer with her own, Richie folds her two newly up fingers into a gun, thumb and pointer up and firing with closed mouth _boom_ at Mike’s pointer, they go back and forth like that for a bit until Richie finally has all ten digits up, Mike wins.

Mike stares victoriously at Richie’s hands, four fingers up on one, all five up on the other tucked behind her back, she takes the one tucked behind her back out and bangs it against the other one to carry her four over to both hands, two and two, Mike argues that she _‘Never told her that was allowed!’_ so they settle on a tie.

Richie wins.

Richie wins.

Richie wins.

Mike wins.

Richie wins.

Mike wins.

Richie feels like crying but for the first time crying feels like a happy thing. Because she _told_ Mike and Mike didn’t run away, no, Mike sat here and played round after round of a game, as simple and juvenile as it was, with her.

She knows that technically she didn’t tell Mike the whole truth about what had happened, that the fact that it all makes her feel so very justified is kind of bullshit; saying she _saw_ a werewolf isn’t the same at all as saying she thinks she _is_ a fucking werewolf, but there is something reassuring about just telling part of it, a secret whispered between new friends, before doing something so _painfully_ normal.

It feels less like constantly maintaining a lie, and it's a risky game for her to be playing, certainly, one she wouldn’t be willing to wager with Bill or Eddie and _definitely_ not in front of Stan, the observant bastard, but with Mike she feels safe.

A human who _saw_ a werewolf and was rather excellent at sticks; that's all she was to this new friend, and she’s more than okay with it.

The scent of blood slowly rusts into something lemony and chemical that stings her nostrils but doesn’t make her feel like she needs to puke anymore, a marked improvement, she thinks, both for her and (admittedly, probably a little more importantly) for Beverly Marsh. 

“Thanks for waiting out here with me.” She offers more easily than she thinks she should for something quite so important, tapping Mike’s ring finger with her pointer.

“No problem, it was fun!” Mike swats at her hand with four fingers, thumb tucked into her palm, sending Richie’s left hand behind her back, “If I’m being honest that much blood would probably freak me out anyway.” She says the last part with so much sincerity it feels fake, it’s almost certainly a lie to make Richie feel better, but she doesn’t mind. 

“Can you just picture that much fucking blood? _All_ over the bathroom? Blech.” She pulls a dramatically disgusted face, sticking out her tongue between her teeth as she reluctantly accepts defeat for this last round.

“Blech.” Mike concurs brightly, “Wanna go again?”

_**-** _

The full moon had just passed before that day in the locker room. One could say she ‘got lucky’ with the timing, if there was any possible way to consider what had happened to her _lucky._

But, unfortunate phrasing or not, she knows that she isn’t going to get lucky a second time, missing June’s full moon by two days means _nothing_ once she crosses July 17th, 1989 off her calendar in a big, shaky handed, black X. She’d been crossing days off in red recently, after Stan had come over and claimed that her previous method of using whatever colored pen she had on hand for scribbling out days hurt her eyes and made her choose one marker and stick to it, but using red to cross off today just felt fundamentally wrong and a little too on the nose.

Richie knows what's coming. She had refused to let it blindside her and, luckily, her father was the kind of man who was constantly dragging her barefooted and jacketless into the cold in the middle of the night on days when the sky was particularly clear to point out his favorite constellations, telling her astronomy facts he didn’t quite understand but liked to pretend he did. So when she asked him non-nonchalantly (fully chalantly, one may say) when the next full moon was he practically threw himself into Derry Public Library’s stack of dusty old books on outer space to get her an answer.

It was an unquestionable fact that the full moon is coming.

If she’s being optimistic, which is feeling more and more foolish as the day goes on, what will happen to _her_ once the moon rises is still questionable.

Slightly questionable, a little bit questionable, you could probably bet your whole life savings one one specific outcome and not be worried at all, almost, questionable. 

Objectively she had no concrete knowledge that she was going to transform, even if the new body hair and new strength and new senses were saying otherwise. It was like the Magic 8 all she’d yanked off the prize counter at the arcade when the teenager manning it was distracted said after she’d asked in her head, eyes squeezed shut too hard for a hunk of plastic, if she was really a _monster._

_All signs point to yes._

Fucking stupid Magic goddamn 8 Ball, she’s glad she didn’t waste the five hundred skee ball tickets she stole from Eddie on it.

Part of her knows that trying to find full proof confirmation is really unnecessary, either it’s going to happen or it won't, but she doesn’t think she can just sit and wait for it. She _knows_ she can’t.

So here she is, sitting in front of her mother’s jewelry box on her parent’s bed, knees tugged to her chest like it will even out her breathing at all. 

Maggie stopped bothering to wake her up for church when she was ten, she’d spent more of the service whining about her itchy tights and tugging at the ends of too tight braids meant to tame curls that really did not want to be tamed than actually praying and Wentworth was quite honestly more than happy to take the excuse to stop attending. Despite this fact, every year like clock work, her Aunt Kathleen would get her a brand new cross necklace for Christmas. When she was younger they had been brightly colored, plastic-beaded, stretchy strings she’d wear to play with and tangle around her fingers until the string snapped, but since her mom had stopped trying to teach her about the wonders of Christianity and whispers about _why Rachel goes by a boy name and never wears skirts and has never talked about her crushes_ cycled their way down the Tozier family telephone wire the necklaces got less fun and she’d started storing them in Maggie’s ornate, multilayered jewelry box for ‘safe keeping’.

This year’s was by far the fanciest, a complicated flower and vine design pressed into the sizable cross charm, looped onto a thin chain she was almost certain she would break if she actually tried to wear it anywhere.

And, most importantly both to her current, slightly desperate final grab at normalcy _and_ Kathleen Tozier who had made absolute certain everyone was _more_ than aware of how much she spent, the necklace was one hundred percent pure silver.

Her mother likes to wear it sometimes, which doesn’t bother her because it’s not like she’s about to, but that means it's just sitting inncolously on top of everything else, like it’s waiting for her to try and grab it, try and confirm what she’ll learn, if she doesn’t know already, in a few hours anyway.

She isn’t sure what she’s supposed to do here, a smart person would just prod it, or move the chain, some little contact that would tell her everything she needed to know, but her honors level algebra summer homework half unfinished in her backpack and her old all A report card from last semester still pinned on the fridge (the bottom torn off so none of their guest sees the notes detailing quite how much of a _disruption_ she tends to be in class from every single teacher, because apparently that's less impressive than passing middle school science, according to her mom. Her father, who had highfived her and taken her out for ice cream when she’d brought it home, disagreed) really means nothing against the objective fact that Richie Tozier is fucking stupid.

So she tugs the cuff of her sweatshirt sleeve over her palm to scoop the necklace up, swinging the pendant in a careful little circle before plopping it directly into her bare, unoccupied palm. 

Because, once again, Richie Tozier is fucking stupid, and maybe more than a little desperate.

It _burns,_ and for a moment she’s too stunned to drop it, because she knew it would. She _knew_ what she was and what was going to happen tonight, and yet she still feels blindsided. 

She lets the necklace slip from her fingers and onto the bed, it feels like the silver should burn straight through the thin fabric of the comforter but it doesn’t, it bounces a little before falling to a tangled, harmless pile. She doesn’t bother to put anything away as she scrambles out and into her room, locking the door behind her like that's going to protect her from _herself_ and something that's already been done. 

Back pressed to the wall between her door frame and bedside table, she slowly, painfully, uncurls her hand and stares as the raised, red floral pattern in the shape of a cross branded into her palm, bloodied and burnt from _silver._

Not fire, not a hot stove top, not even silver someone had heated up until it was burnable, just plain fucking silver she’d touched _multiple times_ before.

The black X scribbled through the seventeen on her calendar seems much more ominous now.

(When she turns back the next morning, the sharp teeth she barely remembers growing in her mouth last night aren’t gone and neither is the cross shaped scar burned into her palm.)

_**-** _

_“What are you afraid of then, Richie?”_

Here is something that Richie Tozier is afraid of. She is afraid of whatever the fuck happened a couple of nights ago, the thing she tries not to think about, the thing she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about. 

She is afraid of the full moon and the way it seemed to be able to make her bones break until they resemble something canine and her nails elongate into something deadly and her teeth sharpen in her mouth so quickly they pierce her bottom lip before her bottom lip faded into fur. Her lip was still split, she’d kept breaking it open with her newly sharpened teeth before super healing could do its job, it’d sort of existed in a perpetual state of scabbed over now, just a thin red line that stung when she pressed her tongue to the inside of it, something she had begun to do when she was nervous. It was stinging now.

It had hurt, for the split second when she was still human enough to be aware, it had hurt so bad she thought, perhaps, she was dying. Perhaps this was going to be what killed her (that is something else that Richie Tozier is scared of: dying, everything being over before she has even had a chance to start), turning into a wolf in her bedroom when her parents are peacefully sleeping on the floor below her (a third thing that scares Richie Tozier, a subset of the second, really: dying in Derry). 

She bit hard on her pillow to muffle the sound and hoped she’d at least be human if they found her body here the next morning. She needs a new pillow now but she isn’t all that sure how to explain to her mom how she tore apart the first one.

Things got blurrier after that. She remembers flashes, muted colors and sharpened noises and something’s blood on her tongue, but she isn’t quite sure specifics, she thinks her mind has suppressed it so she doesn’t fully snap (here is something that really terrifies Richie Tozier about that night: the aching, lingering fear that there is a chance the something’s blood could have been a _someone’s_ . Enough kids have gone missing, what if little Elizabeth Loppen or Corey Mehler who had shown up, already forgotten smiles plastered uselessly on missing posters in the past few days, was gone because she has fucking _eaten them.)_

She’d woken up the next morning somewhere in the woods, naked and filthy and scared, soaked from the chin down in blood that she’s certain isn’t hers. She’d screamed, loud and long until her voice cracked hoarsely out of commission and her shaking had managed to quell enough that she could stand. Her legs felt like they no longer belonged to her, something new shoved under her she was expected to walk on. Her parent’s had been at work when she came home, small miracles, she isn’t sure how she would have explained herself had she come through their front door caked and dirt and blood, wrapped up in a big green garbage bag she’d dumped the trash out of to make a stinky, uncomfortable covering. 

Trash bag dress for the Trashmouth, she’s sure there’s a joke there she doesn’t feel up to making.

She sat on the floor of the shower, let the water run over her long after it had gone cold, and cried.

She still feels like there is blood under her nails and stuck between her teeth, she remembers one time Eddie going on a rant about how it could take up to two or three days to fully digest a lot of meat. Whatever she ate could still be inside her body, not that it quite feels like her body anymore. It feels like something else has taken it over, it had just been kind enough _cruel enough_ to let her stick around.

Her hands haven’t stopped shaking. She’s not sure they will.

(Richie Tozier is afraid most of all, more than dying or dying in Derry or the off chance that instead of a deer’s blood soaked under her nails it was the blood of Derry Elementary’s star T-ball player, that her friends will find out what she is. That they’ll be horrified, that they’ll hate her, that they won’t bother looking if her grainy smile is the next one on a missing poster, they’ll be fucking releived before they forget her all together. She’s a monster and the second they find out they’ll hate her. And that is fucking terrifying.)

She doesn’t say any of those things when her friends ask what she’s afraid of.

_“Oh, uh, Clowns”_ is what she goes with instead. It’s not technically a lie, they freak her out, the creepy little motherfuckers; but it wasn’t what they were asking and she knows that.

(Mike Hanlon has been squinting hard at her, like she’s been trying to work out some complicated math equation since Richie lied about not having seen It before; If _A_ is Richie, _B_ is her confirmed werewolf sighting, and _C_ is a person who's never been terrorized by the clown before then _A_ \+ _B_ really isn’t supposed to add up to _C,_ is it?

Unfortunately, Richie is too caught up in her story to notice the holes she's poking into the ones she’s told before.)

Eddie tells her sarcastically that sucks for her and Stan elbows her hard in the side the next time she teases someone for what they saw, but she can see through their false frustration well enough, even if part of her wants to unhook her ankle from Stan’s, shove off Eddie when she leans against her side when they’re walking. They shouldn’t be touching her. 

No one should be, she’s a fucking monster.

(Here is what Richie Tozier is really afraid of, an itemized list for your convenience: Werewolves, dying in Derry, full moons, whatever went on the night she can’t remember, what she has become, her friends seeing what she’s become and hating her, clowns, and a well worn S in a heart imprinted on the top plank of the kissing bridge, right above the freshly carved R+E that had been etched in on July 18th 1989.) 

_**-** _

Summer is awesome for a multitude of reasons, one of the most important being that you can hang out with your friends literally all day long and no one cares or can stop you with the excuse that ‘you have school tomorrow’. 

Which is why Richie thinks its absolute bullshit that she’s all alone, pouting on the curb outside the arcade she can’t afford to go into because she spent all her allowance on a new pillow and the half melted birthday cake ice cream cone she’s currently trying to pretend isn’t too sweet for her now because she’s incredibly upset by that new were-development. Another reason summer is awesome: fucking ice cream. No friends and an ice creamless future: needless to say she’s upset.

Bill is at softball practice and Stan is doing some planning for her Bat Mitzvah she’s giving up trying to explain to Richie and Eddie’s mom heard her sniffle last night so she’s going to be stuck in the Bagnor ER all day and _Richie_ is fucking _bored_ and _moping_ but _moping_ isn’t as fun when no one else is there to feel bad for you.

_“Tozier!”_

Beverly Marsh skids in front of her, shoving down his kickstand and squatting next to her, close enough that she can see that he’s doodled little designs in permanent marker across the waistband of his pants even though they’re half hidden by a thick brown cowboy-buckled belt that's too big for him. She hadn’t noticed him coming, too lost in whining about how lame today was in her head to be able to create a distinction between _his_ cigarette/crappy cologne smell from the hundreds of other cigarette/crappy cologne people in Derry. (Beverly Marsh smells way cleaner than most of those people though, a little bit like cherry chapstick and Dr. Pepper; he somehow manages to make the overpoweringness of all his smells seem elegant, which Richie appreciates when he’s right next to her even if she doesn’t fucking understand how he does it.)

“Well if it isn’t Archie Andrews!” He flips her off right in front of her face, looking incredibly grossed out and far too amused when she sticks her tongue out to poke his finger with it.

“Heard that one before?”

“Every day of my fucking life.”

“Sucks to suck.” He rolls his eyes, repositioning so he’s sat on the curb beside her, one leg kicked up the wheel of her toppled over bike. 

“Wanna come to Mike’s farm? She and Ben are already there because apparently Mike wanted to show her some _limited edition_ version of a book her grandpa has that they both like and that sounds boring so I said I’d see if any of you guys wanna come too.”

“Everyone else is _doing things_ but I abso-fucking-loutley want to come.”

“Sick.” He offers her a ring stacked hand and helps her up, taking her cone with a bright smile when she finally gives up on trying to accept the sickly sweetness and biting directly into the ice cream seemingly just to hear her scream.

“Onward to the farmlands, Arch!” She manages once she’s done swatting at his arm for his ice cream crimes, flourishing her arm at the empty road.

“Lets go, _Veronica.”_

_“Boo!_ No! I’m Jughead!”

“Whatever you say, Ronnie.” He grins, tongue sticking out between his teeth; winking back at her before kicking onto his bike and starting to pedal away, leaving Richie to scramble to get her bike upwards and mount it.

_“Fuck you, Marsh, I will murder you where you_ **_stand_ ** _!”_

_“Gotta catch me first!”_

(Tragically, apparently any bullshit enhanced speed she’s gained since her genetic makeup has been fucked with isn’t all that helpful on a bicycle.)

Once they get there Mike teaches them how to make flower crowns; strong hands oh-so delicately twisting dandelions into a loop, slow enough that she has time to explain to each of them how to do it, and then even slower so she has time to laugh at them as they rip through the stems and tie terrible knots that don’t hold. Richie thinks she’s getting the hang of it quickly enough but Ben and Bev are fucking hopeless (but they’re all laughing and thats kind of the whole point, isn’t it?). It’s nicer here than most places in Derry, smells like soil and Mike and her friends, all colored only slightly sour with the bitterness that cracks out of the broken dandelion stems; everything is just quieter, more peaceful.

She’s sure it’s the stupid ‘grass is always greener’ anaology her mom likes to reference whenever she’s being whiny, but part of her gets the feeling this is what the world outside Derry probably feels like; quiet, peaceful, smells like friends and dandelion milk.

The other part of her gets the feeling everything pretty much just sucks everywhere.

“When you get new ones make sure you pull it up from the root, my grandpa only lets me do this so they don’t grow back.” Mike comments, tilting her head pointedly in Beverly’s direction as he sheepishly pushes non-uprooted, too short to make into a crown, dandelion heads through the laces of his boots. 

(His boots are bright red, cracking at the corners and faded back to what she assumed was their original brown at the soles where the paint he’d clearly added himself got worn away, and she kind of wants to tell him that with the little yellow flowers tangled up the tongue his shoes looks like ketchup and mustard bottles. But somehow he kind of makes it look cool, which is fucking _rude,_ and she’s pretty invested in trying to figure out how to dig out a dandelion properly so she doesn’t.)

“Why can’t you let them grow back, they’re pretty.” Bev asks instead of trying to defend himself and Mike’s nose crinkles up.

“They’re _weeds.”_

“No they _aren’t!”_ Beverly look offended on the flower’s behalf, which is fair enough, because dandelions are definitely fucking flowers, which she tells Mike matter of factly, leaning against Bev’s shoulder and accepting the high five he offers.

_“Actually,_ Mike’s right, they’re noninvasive but they _are_ weeds.” Ben pipes up, grinning a little crookedly, clearly excited to be able to contribute; which is precious and so fucking _lame_ Richie wants to hug her. She smells less like old books and dusty library carpeting nowadays, but she’s still a fucking dork apparently.

“Thank you, Ben.” Mike pauses for a minute, twisting one final dandelion in to close the loop of the crown she’s working on and plopping it directly into Ben’s hair. She lets out a surprised little huff, eyes crossing a little to look upward at it before she levels Bev and Richie with what seems like an uncharastically shit-eating grin. It’s a fun little contradiction, the flowers slipping forward on her shiny-thin hair in a crooked yellow halo matched up with her obvious bragging that she got one when they didn’t. It's a good look for her, a little less mouse and little more like an established person with friends she feels comfortable enough with to bully. 

“Okay, no. No! Thats bullshit. So we’re not even _making_ flower crowns? We’re making _weed_ crowns?” Bev looks so _incredibly_ put out it’s almost funny, eyebrows drawn together and lips pursed like he’s tasting something sour when he was expecting something sweet.

_“Weed crowns.”_ Richie snorts and his eyebrows don’t unwrinkle but he lets out an incredibly undignified cackle, different from what she’s discovered his laugh _usually_ sounds like, far more surprised, and she’s proud of herself.

_“Nice.”_

“Thank you.” Mike, grinning, chucks a torn off clump of dirt and dandelion root directly at her head; it falls short and leaves a dirt smudge on the rubber toe of her sneaker, which she finds rather commemorative so she doesn’t wipe it off. _Oh, and here's the dirt from the day I made my friends laugh with a weed joke._

“I mean, to be fair, _yeah,_ but you can make these with flowers too, my grandpa would just kill _me_ if I killed his flowers.”

“Nope, too late, you taught us how to make weed crowns, Micycle, that is so much fucking better.”

“I _guess!”_

Ben leans forward on her knees, humming hard as she holds her own mangled flower chain up in front of her face and lets it shakily swing back and forth; a loosely knotted, yellow and green hypnotist’s watch Richie can’t take her eyes off of even as conversation lulls and Bev redirects her dandelion heads into Richie’s hair.

“I don’t know, they’re not _technically_ flowers but they’re still pretty, so, I mean… they should count for something, they’re close enough.” Ben eventually offers, soft enough that it almost sounds like she’s talking directly to the dandelion itself, and Richie feels like she punched her newly pointy teeth in. If someone held her at gunpoint and made her voice her thoughts she’d probably joke that it had something to do with Ben’s failed flower crown hypnosis, but that's not right.

Not a flower but close enough. That's _her._

Richie Tozier is not a human anymore but she should still count for something… right?

“Mmm, I’m a dandelion.” She says, awkwardly out of place, because all of a sudden she feels like she has to say _something_ to fill the silence, let _someone_ in on this Earth shattering revelation she’s just had.

Ben looks sort of like she wants to ask what the fuck that means, which is fair, and Beverly’s hands pause for a second in her hair, like he’s considering whether or not he’s supposed to laugh, which is rather considerate of him, honestly.

Mike’s forehead wrinkles up, considering, fingers tip-tapping almost inaudible on the rolled up ankles of her jeans before her whole demeanor smooths into a grin, plucking a dandelion carefully out of the ground, roots and all, and lofting it to the sky like she’s giving a toast.

“To the Losers Club, just a shit ton of dandelions who managed to grow together!” 

_“Dramatic.”_ Richie huffs (which makes Bev whack her upside the head) but quickly enough they all have a dandelion in hand, cheersing it to the sky and to each other; three not-quite-flower people and one not-quite-human person making weed crowns in late July, just for a minute pretending it's okay that nothing is normal.

It’s nice. Not revolutionary or particularly monumental, definitely not perfect, but nice, and that's good enough for Richie.

“Star Trek is on tonight. Reruns.” Mike comments absently after a while, not bothering to look up for a reaction from where she’s slumped back, eyes closed in basking in the late afternoon sunlight like a cat, legs crossed and hovering just above the ground. 

“Next Gen?” Ben asks, twisting from where she’d scooted over because Richie wanted to show Beverly how to braid and was garbage at doing it on her own hair. Since Mike finished they’ve all sort of given up, something warm and lazy unfurling over them in a way that hasn’t felt feasible in days. (If Richie’s being honest, it hasn’t felt feasible since they found trace amounts of Georgie Denbrough’s blood on a sewer grate in October.)

“‘Course.”

“Awesome.” 

“Do you think they’ll play the last episode, I missed it.” She adds in, trying and failing to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

The moon and the monster in the locker room and the creators of Star Trek _clearly_ didn’t get together to consider that _some_ teenage werewolves would be too busy having the worst fucking night of their life on July 17th, 1989 to watch the season two finale of _Star Trek: The Next fucking Generation._

“Oh my god, you didn’t miss much, it _sucked.”_ Mike launches up from where she’s sitting so quickly she rocks back and forth before flopping onto her stomach and propping herself up on her arms.

“It did kind of suck, I mean, well, I don’t know it wasn’t the _worst-”_ Ben adds before being immediately cut off by Mike throwing her arms out indignantly.

“It was a _clip show,_ we already fucking _watched it,_ it was like watch Riker _die_ and then watch things you’ve already _seen!”_

“Riker _dies?”_ Richie chokes and Ben shakes her head, making a wavering motion with her hand right in front of her face.

“Dorks.” Bev is watching them all curled up around his knees, leaning so his head is resting on top of his arms, crooked grin tilted sideways and playful (It’s very Cheshire Cat adjacent, something she’s come to realize is a sort of theme when it comes to Beverly and his bafflingly relaxed mannerisms). 

The word _Dork_ doesn’t sting when it comes from him, like Loser, it almost sounds like a term of endearment, but Ben’s whole face goes pink anyway.

“Oh, look who's _talking.”_ Unfortunately Richie is looking at who's talking, and while Beverly Marsh is many things, lame and a loser being two of them most certainly, he definitely isn’t a dork, which sucks for her argument, but it felt cool to say and he accepts it with an easy enough nod.

“I mean I’ve never watched _Star Trek,_ so you’re gonna win this dork-off, Tozier, sorry to say it.” Something about the word _dork-off_ reminds Richie that _dork_ is another word for _whale penis_ and she’s already formulating a bad, barely relevant joke around it when the far more important part of Beverly’s comment catches up with her.

“You’ve _never_ seen _Star Trek?”_

“No, I’m _cool.”_

“Nope.” 

“That absolutely _will not_ stand, Bev. Can you guys stay over for longer? We can watch it together?” Mike had started out strong, almost comically decisive, but somewhere along the way she’d wilted; like they were gonna tease her for wanting to hang out with her friends. Richie Tozier decides then and there she doesn’t like a wilty Mike Hanlon.

“Absolutley _fuck yeah.”_ It’s more enthusiastic than it needs to be, but Mike’s smile is less forced so she doesn’t see the harm in it.

“I’ll need to call my mom, but I’m sure she’d be okay with it!” Ben adds.

“I mean, I probably can, but don’t you have like… chores or something?”

“No, I kinda… did everything early so we could hang out.” Mike says, embarrassed, like that isn’t the sweetest thing Richie’s ever heard.

“We could have helped!” 

“No offense, Beverly, but I don’t think a single one of you is suited to farm work. I think you’d break.” Mike offers, flopping lazily on her side to look closer up at him.

“Fair enough.” And Richie thinks that's what she loves about Bev, any other dude she’s met would have gotten bent out of shape at the implication a _girl_ was stronger than him, _especially_ when it was more the implication he would snap like a strand of uncooked spaghetti if he tried to do something that required strength, but he just stretches all the way back, arms criss-crossed behind his head and smile easy. Because Beverly Marsh is the best dude Richie thinks she’s ever met, even if he makes her friends stupid sometimes.

(Or well, Ben and Bill stupid sometimes, Mike, Eddie, and Stan seem equally unaffected. But not for the same reason as her, she’s certain. Mike, Eddie, and Stan are good people who just probably aren’t into redheads and Richie was a monster before she had a bite scarred into her shoulder.)

“Richie’s actually pretty strong!” Ben beams, like it’s a compliment. Which it fucking _isn’t. What the fuck._

“Yeah, _okay.”_ Mike snorts, which would be offensive if she wasn’t _wrong,_ why would Ben _say that?_

“No! No, I know, but actually she’s super fucking strong! She broke a _backboard_ with a _basketball!”_ And, Christ, the way Ben says it, starry eyed and soda-pop-fizzy with excitment, almost makes it sound _cool, but it’s not fucking cool it’s horrifying people can’t do that and she didn’t want to do that why would she bring that up?_

“That was _you?”_ Beverly is sat up in an instant, whirling on her with wide eyes that immediately narrow into skeptical, “No fucking way. You are a _noodle._ ”

“I mean it was _plywood.”_

“Okay but _incorrect! It’s literally made for the express purpose of not being broken by basketballs!”_

“It was really, really cool, like… weird because the teacher was being creepy… but cool!” Ben offers unhelpfully. 

“Wait, what happened?” Mike aims the question out but she's practically squinting through Richie, like she’s trying to put the puzzle pieces of Rachel ‘Trashmouth’ Tozier together but they all look like they come from different boxes; which is a fair enough assessment. It makes her uncomfortable, all of a sudden something in the atmosphere tipping closer to specimen under a microscope and further from friends telling wild, inconceivable stories.

But that might just be Richie’s paranoia kicking in, because when she looks away and then back Mike just looks incredibly confused. Ben explains it for her, Bev poking in with his own, mainly rumor based, take on the story, and it really does sound badass when they tell it, like Richie is some cool, buff rebel who destroyed school property as a fuck you to a rude teacher who was making her uncomfortable.   
She really can’t tell if it makes the reality worse or better but Mike looks skeptically impressed, which is better than the weird, uncomfortable scrutinizing bullshit from before so she’ll take it. Sort of. She still feels fucking sick everytime she thinks of it, like by letting her friends discuss her doing something so fundamentally _weird_ and _wrong_ she’s stepping out onto the ledge of a sky scraper; one wrong move and she’s going to fucking tumble straight to hell.

(The little Stan in her head rolls her eyes so hard it’s painful.

_‘Stop being so_ **_melodramatic_ ** _, dumbass.’_

The little Stan in her head can fuck right off.) 

“Prove it.”

_“What?”_ Mike has one eyebrow cocked, a challenge Richie desperately does not want to be issued. Ben and Beverly’s eyes ping-pong between them, neither of them are trying to hide their delight at the proposition and suddenly the safety of Mike’s farm falls out of alignment; her chest feels tight with how hard her heart jackrabbits against her ribcage. 

All of a sudden the world feels like Derry again, _danger danger danger._

_“Prove it._ We’ve got an old shed out by the woods my grandpa wants to tear down and I’m sure we have a ball here _somewhere.”_

“Nope.” Not Happening. Not Happening. Not Happening.

“Oh come on, Rich, _please?”_ All three of them are looking at her, rivaling Edith goddamn Kaspbrak for Puppy Dog Eyes Of The Year Award on sheer quantity alone. 

And for one second, one tiny, delusional second, she thinks, perhaps, that it would be okay. That it might be _fine_ and _cool,_ the perfect way to ease her new friends into this weird, insane side of herself like when you’re getting a new dog and you need to bring it home a few times first to make sure it's okay in the house and doesn’t try to eat your cat. Little steps to be sure everything will work out.

But then she is reminded that she has probably eaten both the metaphorical and literal cat in this bullshit scenario; that this isn’t a brand new dog situation, this is a gateway goddamn drug that ends with her entirely alone and probably being experimented on in a lab somewhere the second her friends put two and two together that shes a fucking monster.

“Come on, ladies and gent, I _know_ I’m your entertainment for the evening but trick shots were never on my resume.” She’s praying that they don’t notice how her voice is shaking, that they are too distracted with the comedic potential of the scrawniest person to ever exist breaking a solid slab of wood to realize that she’s trying to deflect so desperately her jokes aren’t landing. 

_“Richie-”_ Beverly begs, all sing-songy, and suddenly something unfamiliar and angry bubbles up inside her, why aren’t they _listening?_ She doesn’t _want to,_ she’s been more than fucking _goddamn clear about that, so why won’t they stop?_

“I said _no, asshole, so shut the fuck up about it!”_ The words come out of her mouth but she’s not the one speaking. Whatever inside her snapped it out, dripping with venom and _angry,_ had far too many teeth.

And Beverly Marsh _flinches._

Oh. 

Oh god. 

_Fuck._

She’s the worst fucking person, not a person, just a monster in and out. Even if it came from a place within her she’s unfamiliar with, she still said it. It came from _her_ and now _Mike and Ben look worried and Beverly fucking Marsh looks_ **_scared of her._ ** This is why she never made more friends. Because she sucks and she ruins everything.

_(‘Like a Monster’, the thing with too many teeth grins.)_

“Sorry.” It’s pathetic, a wimpy, too small excuse for an apology.

“No… no we’re sorry.” Mike says after a second, all awkward and concerned and exactly what Richie normally goes to the greatest lengths possible to avoid her friends having to aim in her direction. She’s the funny friend, she’s always happy and silly and _fine,_ she doesn’t _snap_ because her friends want to see her break Mike’s old shed with a basketball. 

But she forgot and now Ben looks like she feels so guilty that she might _cry._

“Our fault, we shouldn’t have pushed.” Bev says once it's clear she isn’t going to respond, easy grin slipping back into place; but he can’t fool her, Richie Tozier is the master of fake smiles and she can see that behind the quirked up corners of his lips Bev is still too small, still too cautious, as much as he’s trying to hide it.

And it’s her fault.

“I think we have the stuff to make cookies… if you guys wanna do that?” Mike asks after a tense, quiet minute, gently, like she’s talking to a spooked animal. (She kind of is.)

“Yes. Yeah, let's do that.” Richie says, probably too quickly.

“I’m down.” Bev says, just as probably-too-quickly, and Ben nods hard in agreement after looking at all three of them quickly to make sure they were all on the same page.

So they make cookies and by the time they burn them everything is somewhat back to normal.

Ben and Mike are right, the rerun episode of the Star Trek finale sucks, but they play the first episode that introduces Q next, and then _Datalore,_ which makes it all up to Richie, at least.

“Okay… okay this is kind of sick.” Bev admits quietly, like he’s trying to say it without them really hearing him as Ben and Richie attempt to out-sing each other over the closing theme. The two of them stop almost impossibly in sync to turn to him from where they’re leaning next to each other against Mike’s coffee table, grinning in a way that has him burying his face into the couch arm and groaning out _‘Do not’._

Mike, who's sitting next to him on the couch, stretches out to grab a handful of popcorn (that they also managed to burn, Richie’s ultra-sensitive nostrils remind her suddenly and with a vengeance) and toss them one by one at his head.

“Dork.” She says, straight faced, before landing a piece directly in a curl to uproarious applause, even Bev lifts his head to give her a high five before picking the piece out and throwing it at Ben. (Who fucking _blushes_ at getting _popcorn harrassed,_ god, Richie doesn’t _get it.)_

“Wait, shut up, this is my _favorite_ Data episode, shut up!” Ben chokes suddenly, whirling back to the screen and waving her hand back at the couch, cheeks still distinctly flushed but momentarily distracted. 

“Yeah, okay.” 

And it is okay, more than okay, actually, Richie is in a good enough mood to say that for right now, regardless of the sharp must of burnt food clinging to the whole house and the shitty season two finale of _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ and the unbroken walls of the shed in Mike Hanlon’s back yard, things are actually pretty fucking great.

(She doesn’t notice how Mike keeps staring at her.)

(She doesn’t extra notice how Mike keeps staring at her teeth.)

_**-** _

There's been changes since the bite, obviously, she knew about those, they had been terrifying and uncomfortable and _bad_ but looking back a month after the initial turning they feel a little less monumental. They were the sort of changes that happened in her dad’s favorite, crappy, old monster movies before the story gave way to a fake full moon and splattered ketchup blood; the very same changes that made up the plot of Issue #1 in a free set of comics she’d found in a thrift store while visiting her cousins about a werewolf superhero a year ago and subsequently gave herself nightmares over after reading them all in one night.

It was puberty bullshit but if puberty bullshit involved extra hair and super strength and semi-deadly new allergies to a fully non-allergenic metal.

She hadn’t accounted for how much everything was going to go to shit _after the fact._

The worst was probably her teeth; they _still_ hadn’t dulled out yet despite her hope that maybe they’d shrink back down with time. She was still trying to get used to the feel of the extra long canines in her mouth, which was fucking bullshit. It was like when she had first gotten braces, she couldn’t always get her words out right and her tongue never knew where to go and she kept splitting her lip on the sharp shit in her mouth she didn’t fucking want in there in the first place.

Unlike her braces, which had immediately earned her a plethora of different nicknames (which were honestly all just variations on ‘metalmouth-trashmouth’, because her classmates really weren't as clever as they thought) most people hadn’t seemed to notice her teeth, though, or comment on them, which was… odd.

In a place like Derry any abnormality was really a breeding ground for teasing regardless of if the person being teased could fully, mentally handle it (which Richie simply couldn’t, if she is being honest). 

She’d been preparing for an absolute shitstorm of bullying, _Hurricane Trashmouth,_ the second she walked outside her house.

But no one said anything. 

She’d had to go face to face with _Greta Goddamn Keene_ two days ago, the master of pinpointing the exact thing you want to hide, but she’d just called her four eyes and thrown her change across the counter; if Greta had seen them everyone _should_ have heard about them within the hour.

But they _didn’t._

_Because she didn’t notice._

After that she remembered something incredibly goddamn important about her hometown: For all its pointed hatred for everything _not normal,_ Derry was, admittedly, very good at ignoring everything _so_ not normal it tipped anywhere out of the realm of plausible. So she’s pretty sure her and her teeth are somewhat safe from the general population, for now.

What they aren’t safe from is her friends; _Bill,_ who was so fully baffled by them the first time she realized how pointy they’d grown that she hadn’t been able to articulate at all her hundreds of questions and settled on hitting Richie’s backpack a bunch of times, very hard, as she trailed after her down the sidewalk looking for an explanation she was _certainly_ not going to get; _Ben,_ who hadn’t said anything about them yet but she kept catching trying and failing to avoid looking at them whenever she talked; _Bev,_ who had stared at her mouth for a total of twenty seconds before declaring them _‘wicked’_ and giving her a high five; _Mike,_ who just kept _staring._

Eddie had freaked out so hard she hadn’t been able to form words other than _fuck_ and, _fuck’s_ favorite cousin, _what the fuck._ Eventually Bill dragged her away, looking semi-concerned and semi- ‘I also would like any sort of explanation for what the fuck is going on but you’re definitly not doing this right so lets go gossip out of the room’. They both came back with ice cream twenty minutes later, Eddie’s lips firmly sealed and a full bite taken out of the top of the popsicle she’d gotten for Richie (which quite honestly she hadn’t been sure whether to take as a sign that everything was fine or that Eddie was pissed at her until she realized it was root beer flavored, by all means the worst goddamn flavor of popsicle, which was something Eddie most certainly knew, and then she was incredibly aware of where she stood on Edith Kaspbrak’s shit list of the week).

Stan still hadn’t commented on her teeth at all, and it was getting harder to convince herself she just hadn’t noticed.

She's not sure which reaction upsets her more.

All that being said, as unsafe from scrutiny her and her teeth are from her Losers, they are in significantly more danger from her _father._

She thinks he’s still getting contacted daily from his baffled colleagues around the country after he’d sent them a truly obnoxious number of photos asking for any possible answers over the course of the most frustrating trip to his practice she’d ever had. It’d taken two and a half hours just to convince him she hadn’t taken a file to them because of some new fad before he even _tried_ to check her, fully intact, thank you very much, _Wentworth,_ enamel.

Despite the absolute bullshit that was her teeth post-full-moon, her senses, seemingly, evened themselves out after the initial shock of being another fucking species. They’re still relatively inconsistent; too bright or too loud or too rough all at once still makes her feel like she’s about to combust inwards and outwards, but apparently turning into a dog makes that combustion happen less often.

But part of that might be the fact that Ben Hanscom now shoves her walkman full of exclusively _New Kids on the Block_ in her backpack ‘just in case’ every time she knows she’ll be hanging out with Richie and Stan Uris is _wonderfully_ observant to the inner workings of her best friend and occasionally dragged her away from situations starting to overwhelm her before Richie herself can even realize she’s getting overwhelmed.

That was sort of another change, though an almost entirely non-werewolf related one.

She had more friends now; six whole friends who actually _liked_ her and wanted to spend time with her. Who still want to watch Star Trek with her even after she snaps at them and she can have non-awkward silences around, which she’s only ever been able to do with Bill, Eddie, and Stan, really, and known them since second grade.

She has **_six_ ** awesome fucking friends.

And it was nice.

And fucking terrifying everytime she thinks about everything that has changed in the past few months.

(Another Change: Though she doesn’t want to admit it, she stares at the moon every single night now; even when it’s hidden, washed behind clouds, she always seems to find it, but admitting it to herself feels like giving in. Giving into _what_ exactly is something she doesn’t quite know.)

_(Another_ Another Change: Some nights it stares back.)

**_-_ **

Eddie is already awake when Richie climbs up to her window, which was, quite honestly, to be expected. It’s one of the reasons why she can so confidently go to Eddie’s whenever she wants, as much as her friend preaches a good night’s rest and rants about the physical ramifications of staying up as late as Richie tends to, she’s a night owl in her own right and she’ll almost always answer a knock on her window late into the early AM hours.

She doesn’t see her right away, her back facing the window with head bent over a book. Richie knows, as she steadies her sliding sneaker soles on plastic siding and readjusts her grip on the window ledge, that she caught her at a good time; only the right side of her hair is braided. 

Her and her mom have unwittingly made hair braiding into something of a routine. At seven forty five, like clockwork, her mother twists her hair into two long braids, tight enough that it is apparently painful. And then starting at eight eighteen (she has to take a couple minutes after her set bedtime to make sure her mother won't barge in), she unbraids her hair and then redoes them loose enough that it doesn’t hurt anymore but her mother will be none the wiser in the morning. However, unbraiding is a process and she almost always gets distracted. Richie knows the braiding schedule better than she knows her class schedule: If it was all braided Eddie would be mentally preparing herself to go to sleep and _significantly_ less willing to put up with Richie’s bullshit, but half braided has potential.

She jolts when Richie finally taps on the window, face splitting into a smile that she expertly schools into something that is trying to be annoyed but fails miserably enough it makes Richie’s chest feel warm. She closes her book around her pointer to mark the page and starts the, frankly absurd, process of unlocking her window.

_(‘Two locks keeping the window shut, a chain lock as reassurance, and one on the screen, just in case, Edie-Bear! Need to keep my baby safe!’ Fat fucking chance, when the real threat to her saftey is in the goddamn house,_ **_Sonia._ ** _)_

Richie barely needs to glance at the light blue cover to know what it is. Eddie goes through these literary kicks where she picks one book and obsesses over it for a year; it's such an organized routine that she had claimed indignantly to Richie that she thought Bill was copying her during her _Are You There God_ stint. The past few months her latest obsession has been _Breakfast At Tiffanys_. 

She liked to claim, in her endearing nose-in-the-air, telling-you-so, Eddie way, that she liked it because it was a ‘classic’ and that she ‘thought it was really smart’ how the author didn’t waste time describing the _boring_ main character, in favor of focusing on the much more fascinating Holly Golightly.

And, while Richie thinks that's all at least somewhat true, _somewhere_ in Eddie’s weird little brain; she gets the feeling it has more to do with how blatantly her friend has misinterpreted Truman Capote’s take on Holly’s freedom; which is way too fucking sad for Richie to think about too long but really does explain why Eddie was willing to fish it out of the _garbage_ when her mother had realized how quite many times the word _dyke_ was used and apparently made Eddie recite the _Hail Mary_ while she ‘disposed’ of it in a slightly less destructive manner than with Bill’s poor copy of _Are You There God_.

God, Richie fucking hates Sonia Kaspbrak. If she wasn’t such an excellent victim for ‘Your Mom’ jokes, Richie thinks she would have her wolf form eat her.

_(Correction: If Richie wasn’t a pussy ass bitch who was terrified of the concept of murdering someone and also intimidated by the idea of Eddie being mad at her for eating her mom she’d have her wolf form eat her.)_

“Oh, dear _Fred!_ Thank goodness you’re awake, I just had to escape all those _men!_ You’d think they’d get tired of chasing after me eventually, but, well, you know how it is, don’t you darling?” She trills in a terrible impersonation of Audrey Hepburn and Eddie’s smile drops in disappointment, not that she couldn’t have been expecting this, for the past few months, just as long as the little blue novel has been around, Richie has done word for word the same entrance. It’s just what she always does.

“Shut up, my mom’s asleep! And your Audrey Hepburn still sucks.” She quips, closing the window behind her as Richie tumbles on her bed, wrist bent dramatically dainty over her forehead, because that's what she always does.

“Ah, but my dear, sweet, _darling_ Eds, you still knew who it was.” She pokes her nose and, as Eddie sticks her tongue out at her, grabs the still intact braid, swinging it like a jump rope a couple of times before starting to unravel it, because that's what she always does. 

Eddie shifts so she’s pressed against her knees, holding out her hand for the book mark on her bedside table that Richie stretches awkwardly out to get, refusing to release the braid and half dragging her with her. She succinctly marks her page with her little Bill-Denbrough-Exclusive bookmark; a folded piece of notebook paper doodled full of superheroes and tiny animals and semi-realistic flowers (Eddie has a weird thing about dog earring her pages). Once she’s done she looks expectantly over at Richie, who is already halfway through unbraiding the tail of too long hair. It’s all so routine and comfortable it almost makes Richie want to cry; _this_ is exactly what she needs, even if it’s selfish, even if she knows she probably shouldn’t get so close.

“You’re not Holly Golightly, by the way. You’re Cat if anything.” Eddie remarks belatedly, sort of pouting, not because she has any reason to be but because she thinks being slightly obnoxious is fun. It almost goes without saying that’s what she always does, but this time Richie’s quick, almost-scheduled response, something that really just boils down to her wanting to say pussy because it grosses Eddie out, dies on her tongue; faltering, short circuiting as her brain fires off error messages: because that's _wrong,_ she can’t be Cat anymore, can she? Not if she’s a dog. 

The thought almost makes her want to laugh, becuase, fuck, that really is _comedy gold_ right there, too much of a _bitch_ to be Cat actually, Eds, wakka fucking wakka, but mostly it makes her want to cry. She knows she’s being ridiculous but it’s the kind of thing, when you're twelve and confused and feel as though the world is out to get you, where one little thing is enough to send you toppling over the edge.

And for Richie, apparently, it’s a fucking inside joke about being a _fictional cat._

“Richie?” What a hell of a time to remember she’s probably never cried in front of Eddie before. It was something she tended to keep to a small circle of people including herself, Samantha Uris, and her dad, though not if she could help it; but _now,_ without her permission Edith Fucking Kaspbrak has managed to weasle her way into the exclusive ‘watch Rachel Tozier cry like a stupid, dumb, idiot baby club’, “Shit, Richie, don’t cry, oh my god, I’m so sorry, did I do something?”

Eddie scrambles around so she’s facing her, tilted up on her knees so she’s taller and hands hovering awkwardly around her like she isn’t sure where to settle them.

“No! No you didn’t do anything! I’m not crying!” She manages, her whole face scrunching painfully tight for a minute before she levels Eddie with what she hopes is a convincing grin.

(It’s not.)

“Richie?” Eddie asks softly, hesitant and looking more horrified than Richie really ever wanted her to, one hand coming up awkwardly like she wants to wipe her tears away but doesn’t know if she’s allowed to. Richie swats her hands away, roughly rubbing her eyes against the sleeve of her sweatshirt until they're red and irritated, but, thankfully, slightly, drier.

“I’m okay.”

(She’s not.)

“Bullshit.”

“You’re bullshit.” The concern half-slips off of Eddie’s face into frustration as she whips around to pick up her pillow and slam it into the side of Richie’s head (gentler than she would have any other time, but it makes Richie feel better if she just ignores that). She keeps wailing her with it as Richie tries to slap it out of her hands, brightly (and still, unfortunately, wetly) sing-songing that she's _bullshit bullshit bullshit._

It’s nice, hushed and silly and _normal normal normal_ until Eddie catches Richie’s flailing hand, other still occupied with her pillow. 

Now, this would have been perfectly fine if several things didn’t happen. 

If Eddie had just laughed and tossed her hand away like she was planning to, it wouldn’t have been a problem. If Richie had shoved her away and taken the opportunity to get the pillow like she was planning to, it wouldn’t have been a problem. 

If Eddie had just not _looked_ it wouldn’t have been a problem.

But none of those things happened and it was. Eddie’s laugh dies in her throat as she lets the pillow slip to the floor, fingers tightening around her wrist as she stares at the inside of Richie’s hand. Richie’s stomach drops.

“What the _fuck_ is this… Rich?” Her sentence ends earlier than Richie thinks she intends to, her name coming out a choked, breathy afterthought as she presses her thumb into the ugly, complicated cross shaped scar seared into her palm. It stings a little, not the action quite as much as the memory of getting it, but when she hisses Eddie, who in fairness doesn’t know that, drops her hand so fast it slams against her thigh.

“It’s nothing.” Eddie glares at her, angry, squinty eyes snapping between her face and her hand, which for some reason she has left palm up on her leg instead of yanking it to her chest or hiding it protectively in her sleeve like she longed to, “Okay, so, it’s not nothing. But it’s, like, not a big deal, okay?”

“Yes it fucking _is,”_ She snatches her hand back up again, carefully this time, only gripping at the tops of her fingers with one hand, the other hovering awkwardly on her wrist, “How the fuck did you even _do this?”_

“I didn’t!” Richie snaps, suddenly defensive despite the validity of Eddie’s concern, despite the fact that she _had_ done it, just in a way she can never explain. All her bravado drains out of her when Eddie’s face crumples in concern, grip on her wrist tightening.

“Who the _fuck_ did then?” She winces at the severity in her friend’s eyes, swallowing back the quip about Mrs. Kaspbrak having a pain kink that she can just _tell_ won’t go over well. 

“Hockstetter.” She manages quickly enough, she can see questions devolving behind Eddie’s painfully expressive eyes and she needs to nip this in the bud before she starts thinking things about Richie and her homelife or whatever uncomfortably inaccurate conclusion she would end up jumping to.

Based on the horrified way Eddie is gaping at her, the automatic fall back on their currently missing psychopathic bully who tended to target Richie in general was possibly the best and worst thing she could do in this situation. Richie had always been good at that, inconveniently setting up contradictions. 

_“What?”_

“Yeah, he just, um, he did it.” She yanks her hand away and Eddie levels her with such a glare she nervously gives it back.

_“How?”_ Richie supposes that's a fair enough question even as she scrambles helplessly for an answer.

“He just…. he fucking heated up a cross necklace with his stupid fucking lighter and held it against my hand. It’s fine. No biggie.” She manages to choke out, it’s a convoluted and messy excuse but Patrick tended to air on the side of convoluted and messy so she just might get away with it. 

“You think that's _fine?_ Richie, that's not fine, that's _horrifying!_ Why didn’t-”

“Can we stop talking about it? Please.” 

Eddie looks like she wants to fight her on it. Quite honestly Richie doesn’t know why she doesn’t, she really wouldn’t have fucking blamed her if she had, but, whether it was Richie crying over getting called a cat earlier or the potentially traumatizing implications of her lie or something else entirely, something manages to restrain Eddie’s rage-passion-care enough that she just pats her wrist a little too hard and chokes out the word ‘okay’ like it physically pains her.

She lets Eddie clean the scar, just as a peace offering to smooth over the bumpiness left in the wake of her obvious secret keeping. It’s pretty useless, something Eddie is clearly aware of and stubbornly ignoring as she pats the area down with hydrogen peroxide that doesn’t get a chance to sting or bubble on the healed up skin. She wraps it too tightly for something that doesn’t need to be wrapped in the first place, but Richie doesn’t argue, it’s nice watching the shiny pink permanent reminder burned into her hand disappear, even if she knows it’s just temporary.

Eddie presses a kiss to the center of her bandaged palm once she’s done, absent and unthinking, it doesn’t mean anything and Richie knows this. Apparently, though, her stomach doesn’t get the memo as it bottoms out and then proceeds to twist itself into thousands of tiny little knots.

She slides to the floor as theatrically as possible, letting her arm slump over her eyes and very hopefully doing a good impression of someone who was completely fine instead of someone with a silver singed palm and still watery eyes.

“What's the verdict Dr. K? Am I gonna make it?” She slams her wrapped hand harder into Eddie’s bed frame than she means to and gets hushed somewhat frantically before Eddie snorts and, surprisingly, crawls down next to her instead of staying comfortably on the cushiony high ground of her mattress she tends to prefer. 

She props herself up with one arm, still unbraided hair falling in her face, wavy, inconvenient strands that she keeps trying to blow away out of the corner of her lips with little to no success as she grabs Richie’s wrist and flops it in front of her face before patting it succinctly and letting it fall.

“You’ll live.”

“What would I _ever_ do without you?” It might come out slurred with the southern accent she intends it to, but her sentence still hangs in their air between them, a little too genuine for comfort. Eddie flicks the center of her forehead and tells her it’s good she'll never have to find out, from the way her face screws up unpleasantly it also comes out with less bite than she had meant for it to have.

Richie reaches out and tugs on one of the strands of hair hanging in Eddie’s eyes in an attempt to break the serious silence that had fallen over the room, earning her a, probably harder than intended, slap at her ribs. They both break into giggles, tentative and hushed and entirely aimless, but it's better than the silence.

Eddie lets her arm slide out from under her, settling fully onto the carpet, left leg hooked around Richie’s right.

“What do you think is gonna happen, you know, with Bill and… and the _thing_ we saw?” She whispers eventually, all her words rushed together. Richie’s stomach turns a little, _somehow_ she’d almost forgotten why she came over here in the first place.

They were going into Neibolt tomorrow, and Richie doesn’t think she’s been this unsettled since the night before the full moon. (Either way there was a monster hiding somewhere in the tomorrow of both instances. Richie’s getting tired of monsters.)

“Nuh-uh-uh Spaghetti, the thing _you_ saw.” She doesn’t know why she’s still lying about it, telling Eddie even a little seems like too much. She’s strong, Richie knows that, she could handle it, but a small part of her still wants to protect her from it. 

A big part of her just doesn’t want her to hate her.

“Fuck you.” She snaps, voice wavering with more fear than Richie had expected. She grabs her hand and squeezes it tight.

“Hey, look, we’ll be fine! How bad can it _really_ be?”

_**-** _

Bad.

Very Bad, is the answer to that question. Richie almost feels like she jinxed them by saying it would be okay, but she gets the feeling there was no way this would have not ended poorly.

But as she stares at the short straws clutched in her and Eddie’s sweaty palms as the trail into the crackhouse after Bill, it really fucking feels like she cursed the two of them particularly. 

They still follow Bill, despite how hard Eddie is shaking next to her and the bile Richie can already feel clawing its way up her throat, because they would follow Bill into hell without hesitation, a scenario which feels like it’s becoming less and less hypothetical with each step she takes into the front hallway.

There is something strange about walking into the house you’ve always sprinted past to avoid; you never know what to expect and you’ll always be somewhat wrong. She’d spent her entire life being told stories about what went on inside Neibolt house-

(When she was in second grade someone had drawn, in the little-kid version of photorealism that was just a crayon wax box with a triangle on top and the words _29 Neibolt Street_ in shaky handed permanent marker under it for their class halloween party’s ‘haunted house’ drawing contest, they hadn’t won but the ghost stories they told at recess about the spirits haunting the property, colored with the condescension of a seven year old who knew something you didn’t, still freaked her out.

_‘My big sister says that there is a monster living in the basement who will eat your eyes if you go down there!’_

In fifth grade the rumors got a little less fantastical and a little more fucked, a month after some kid washed up in the shallow edge of the barrens no one could identify. Derry police had written off as an animal attack, they always did, but somehow the entirety of her grade had decided a crazy axe murderer lived in Neibolt and if you trespassed on the property he’d get you next.

_‘I heard if you go inside there isn’t anything behind the door, you just get sucked into a black hole.’_

_‘God, don’t be stupid, it’s just a crackhouse full of druggies.”_

Apparently, according to several girls who liked to gossip about things they really didn’t know much about, multiple ‘happy’ couples had gone to Neibolt for privacy from their parents while they _‘wink wink, nudge nudge, you know what’_ and never came back out, they probably just ran away… but you never know.

_‘Beverly Marsh and his crackhead dad probably live there!’)_

-But from where she’s standing in the front room it sort of just feels like a normal house, and she’s not quite sure why that’s so unsettling.

It shouldn’t be _normal,_ it’s practically offensive… and uncomfortable.

Every instinct, human or otherwise, is telling her that they need to _get the fuck out,_ she can run faster now, she’s stronger, she could probably scoop up Bill, in all her bean-poley skinniness, and Eddie, in all her tiny compactness, and get out of here before whatever is hiding behind the normalness makes itself known (it’s just like the locker room and she wants to _leave)._

But she can’t, she _knows_ she can’t.

“This is fucking insane! Bill, this is _crazy!_ Why are we _here!”_ Eddie, apparently, doesn’t know that. She reaches out to grab her hand and squeezes it, mostly to get her to shut the fuck up (and only a little bit because she just wanted to). 

All three of them know _why_ they’re here, sort of, Richie thinks that maybe she’s the only one who really gets that they’re here for different reasons. Eddie is here because Eddie would take a running leap off a bridge without hesitating if Bill asked her to, and to be fair Richie probably would too. They’re both here because they’re good fucking friends,

They’re all _pretending_ they're here to fight the clown or some bullshit but in reality they’re here for Bill and Bill is here to try and find her little brother; and that's not really something you ask for clarification on. 

Eddie shuts her mouth with an audible click, squeezing back too hard like she’s trying to funnel all her anxiety into Richie through her fingers and doing a pretty goddamn good job of it.

It’s too quiet in here, she realizes, thats whats making the ‘normal’ feel so fucking wrong. Richie didn’t ever think she’d say that after the world became so very loud, but Neibolt house seems like it exists in a vacuum, an anti-echo chamber where she can hear every stuttering breath leaving her and her friends' lungs and the dust shifting across the floor and absolutely nothing else. Even the sunlight managing to force its way through filthy, boarded up windows feels fake, it feels like nothing should be in here, not light, not noise, and _certainly_ not her.

Eddie lets go of her hand to wander over to Bill, and she can’t help but feel a little bit betrayed, a little more useless, and a lot fucking scared when she looks across the room directly into her own eyes, black and white and faded by the sun under a bold lettered _MISSING_ and she has no one to grab onto to confirm she’s actually here and safe and as okay as she possibly could be given the circumstances.

She’s across the room faster than she wants to be, but not because of her newly acquired werewolfness; because as she walked over to it, stopping between each step and taking as long as she possibly could, all she could think was that maybe, just maybe, the floorboards with give out from under her sneakers and she could just fall to her death instead of having to face whatever was across the room.

But that doesn’t happen. Which is bullshit.

The paper tears out easily from under the thumbtack it's pinned under, worn thin from sun exposure and time that shouldn’t have passed, because it says she’s _missing but she’s not missing she’s right here, is she missing? It’s old, how long has she been missing? Did no one look? What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? Not Missing Not Missing Missing Missing Missing-_

**_Wanted._ **

The back is different.

She should have crumpled it up, should have thrown it away, should have torn it to shreds, but she didn’t; she flipped it over and now she is too frozen to do any of those should-haves because the back is different and she can’t _breathe._

**_Wanted_ **

_Dead or Dead._

_Reward is getting the Monster the fuck out of your town._

The picture on the front was her seventh grade yearbook picture, it’d been a week after she’d gotten her braces off (and four weeks before her teeth started bunching back out of place in two crooked, fucked up rows _again)_ and she was smiling a little bit too wide, eyes all squinty. Her mom had tried, and failed, to straighten her hair, she’d wanted it to be manageable but despite her best intentions she never actually knew how the fuck to deal with Richie’s curls, and her glasses where taped up the middle because Patrick Hockstettar had just started his creepy bullshit where he broke them in half just to watch her stumble when she tried to run away. 

On the back is just a wolf. Familiarly black furred, familiarly squinty eyed, and grinning with just as many teeth, but, oh boy are they far more bloody than they had been in her yearbook picture. 

She hadn't seen herself on the night of the full moon, and if she had she wouldn’t have remembered it, but somehow she gets the feeling that this is exactly what she would look like.

It’s _her._

_Obviously it’s her, it would make no sense if it wasn’t her, but it says monster. She’s not a monster? But isn’t she though?_

_Whose blood is it?_

_Where’d you get it?_

_Who’d you_ **_kill?_ **

_Monster, Monster, Monster._

**_Wanted_ ** _,_ **_Wanted_ ** _,_ **_Wanted_ ** _._

It takes her a moment to register just how hard she’s panicking, she thinks she’s saying something but she doesn’t know _what_ and she doesn’t know _how_ because she really fucking feels like she can’t get any air at all. She should have got the fuck out of here, with her friends or not, she should have _gotten the fuck out! Not_ **_Safe_ ** _, Not_ **_Safe_ ** _, Not_ **_Safe_ ** _._

“R-Ruh-Richie, calm _duh-duh-d-down!”_

And then someone is grabbing her face. She doesn’t know who, because at some point she closed her eyes, and she flinches so hard she can almost feel her brain bounce against her skull; the only thing keeping her from genuinely falling back from the force of it is the hands still firmly cupping her cheeks.

“Hey, c-c-com-me on, _luh-look at me.”_

Her eyelids hurt from how hard she’s scrunching them but eventually she manages to pry them open and she’s looking directly into Bill’s eyes. Not her own. Not a wolf’s. Bill’s.

“I’m not _missing.”_ She whines, because it’s all she can do and Bill looks genuinely scared in a way Richie isn’t sure she’s ever seen before, which doesn’t make any _sense, she’s safe but nothing makes any fucking sense._

“Calm _duh-down,_ Richie, you aren’t muh-making any sense,” Exactly. That’s the _problem,_ why doesn’t she get that that’s the problem, “You’re okay, you’re right here, there aren’t any….wuh-wolves, I’ll keep you safe.”

“No!”

“Yes! It’s not fucking _ruh-real!”_

“I’m not _missing! I don’t want- I don’t want it! I.... I’m not… I’m not a.... missing.”_

The Losers had always been a touchy group, even Stan, who tended to be the most reserved with that kind of thing, would happily flop her legs in someone’s lap when watching a movie at a sleepover or lock pinkies with whoever she was jumping with on her way off the quarry. Eddie and Richie especially liked to hang off each other, and she, specifically, got to experience the majority of Stan’s random bursts of tactileness, but her and Bill didn’t really… cuddle. Whenever they played video games they were practically on top of each other the whole time, shoving and flopping and annoying, sure, Richie made Bill give her an absurd amount of piggyback rides when she didn’t feel like walking because she knew she would never say no even if she complained the entire time, and when Bill was bored she liked to seek out Richie and plop directly into her lap because eventually she knew she’d either be entertained or get her hair braided, depending on the day.

A pair of clingy menaces? Yes.

A pair of mutual nuisances? Most certainly.

But a pair of cuddlers they were not.

All that being said, when Bill lets go of her face to tug her against her chest, one hand leaving her shoulder to tear the poster out of her hands and throw it behind her like Richie should have when she first saw it, before reaching up to cradle the back of her head close, mumbling that _she's okay and Bill’s got her and it’s not real,_ she’s never felt more safe.

_She’s okay, it’s not real._ _  
_ _Bill’s got her._ Bill who she’s been friends with since second grade, Bill who smells like bike tires from far away and like Citrus Cooler Gatorade and colored pencil shavings from where Richie’s nose is pressed into her collar bone, Bill who she trusts with everything but one (two) secrets. Big Bill who is safe, and with her Richie is safe, _safe, safe, safe._

_“Fuck.”_

“Are you okay?” Eddie asks, and slowly Richie feels her brain come back online, peripheral vision fishbowling out to the rest of the room that isn’t just Bill once she slowly pries her head away from her shoulder. She’d forgotten Eddie was even there, and she finds a second to feel bad about it somewhere in the insane rush of emotions flushing through her entire body. She looks _so_ fucking scared, hand lingering near her mouth and eyes blinking bugged-out wide in a way only Eddie Kaspbrak would be able to manage.

“No.”

“Mhm. Okay. _Okay, okay, okay_. Are we… are we still going to go further in?”

Richie wants to say no, scream and shout, throw a tantrum, gangly, too strong limbs kicking and thrashing against the floor like a toddler until they get the fuck out of here.

This is _stupid,_ this isn’t _safe,_ this is like a _locker room you hide out from bullies in until it’s clear there is something so much worse inside._

But Bill is already walking out of the main room and down the hall, and it’s Bill, so Richie follows her.

(Edith Kaspbrak holds back for a minute, she knows its a bad idea, but, as she bends over to scoop up the now-crumpled poster that had made her friend who was _always fucking okay_ somehow _not fucking okay,_ she realizes she’s fucking _pissed._ Fucking terrified still, yes, but fucking pissed too becuase thats not _allowed._   
Richie isn’t supposed to be that scared, that’s Eddie’s job, and it’s fucking bullshit that some piece of paper managed to send that order toppling so fantastically fast.

It’s a missing poster, and she realizes, queasily, that the picture of Richie isn’t _normal;_ what looks like claw marks slashed directly across the front of her face; eyes torn open to the bone and gore below, veins blackened with disease, skin rotting, and mouth dripping with bloody bile. 

Richie mutilated.

Richie diseased.

Richie _dead dead dead with the words_ **_You Know You Can’t Protect Them, You’re Too Fucking Weak_ ** _scrawled over her the contact information in what is too tacky when she runs her finger over it to be marker._

No wonder she was so freaked out. Eddie needs her goddamn inhaler just looking at it.

God, she knows this is what Richie had seen, it had to be, but it feels like the broken Richie’s grin is aimed directly at her. 

She’s fucking terrified to turn to the side that had actually been what seemed set Richie into a panic attack so severe Bill had needed to intervene.

But when she finally does there's nothing there.

Weird.

She finally looks up from the paper, but Bill and Richie are nowhere to be found, too deep down the hall for her to see. For a second she lets herself glare at the front door, desperately trying to manifest one of the other Losers opening it up and giving her an out, because, _shit,_ something about just being in this house makes her chest feel too tight and her lungs feel too small. But she thinks about the dead Richie on the side of the poster she refuses to look at again, she thinks about Bill, helping her all alone because Eddie couldn’t fucking do anything herself.

_Shit._

She heads down the hallway and up the stairs.)

_(Please Note: She’s too late, she won’t catch up to them, she probably should have just walked out the front door when she had the chance._

_But Eddie Kaspbrak doesn’t know that yet._

_She also doesn’t know that she's walking closer and closer to where the floorboards are thinning.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY I'M AWARE I REALLY FUCK WITH THE TIME LINE HERE b u t it's my fic and I forgot the bathroom thing happened before the rock war and Mike Hanlon And Richie Tozier Deserve To Bond and also I wrote the Richie Fear scene before I thought I was gonna publish this and I fuck with it way to hard to change it SO Richie's just Very In Love but fun and early and based on werewolf trauma and not Homophobic trauma  
> Anyway!! She's a good girl!! I'm gonna be really fucking mean to her!! Thanks for reading!!

**Author's Note:**

> With a running 'Fuck' count of 171 here is the lesbian Were-Richie fic I started writing in July, planned on posting on Halloween, and now am offering like a maybe late Christmas present.  
> (As always thank you to @haaaawaiianshirt on Tumblr they are an icon and the best to discuss AUs with PLEASE go check out her incredible art!!!)


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